How to Make a Life as a Poet

by Gary Mex Glazner

Overview

In his follow-up to the well-received How to Make a Living as a Poet, Gary Mex Glazner interviews poets on the many — and sometimes surprising — ways they bring the art into their lives and the lives of others. Among the many interviews: Marc Smith, inventor of the poetry slam, tells of his innovative project that put poems in 100,000 pizza boxes. Beth Lisick talks about opening for Neil Young. Michelle Tea dishes on touring with two vans chock full of “Sister Spitters.” Liz Belile heats things up with her fearless, feminist porn. Judith Tannenbaum discusses her work with prisoners, while Tom Mayo talks about using poetry to remind medical and law students of their humanity. Glazner also provides an array of useful tips and insights, including examples of query letters for sponsorships, how to coach a Precision Poetry Drill Team, and a section on insurance plans for writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933368146
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press, Inc.
Publication date:	02/28/2006
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

Under My Roof

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By Nick Mamatas

Soft Skull Press

Copyright © 2006 Nick Mamatas
All right reserved.

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Chapter One

My name is Herbert Weinberg. I know what you're thinking. That sounds like an old man's name. It does. But I'm twelve years old. And I know what you're thinking.

In fact, I'm sending you a telepathic message right now.

Yes, it's about the war. And yes, it is about Weinbergia, the country my father Daniel founded in our front yard. And yes, I have been missing for a while, but I'm nearly ready to go back home.

But I'll need your help. Let me tell you the story.

It was Patriot Day, last year, when Dad really went nuts. Thoughts were heavy like fog. Not only was everyone in little Port Jameson remembering 9/11, they were remembering where they were on September 11th, 2002, September 11th, 2005, 2008, on and on. The attacks were long enough ago that the networks had received a ton of letters and email demanding that they finally re-air the footage of the planes slicing through the second tower, because nobody wanted to forget. Schools took the day off. Banks closed. Some cities set up big screens in public parks to show the attacks. I was excited to finally see the explosions myself. Nobody else could really picture them properly anymore. I drew a picture in my diary.

My mother Geri had forgotten pretty much everything except how beige her coffee was that day. She had been pouring cream into her blue paper cup when she looked up out of the window of the diner and saw the black smokedowntown, and she had just kept pouring till it spilled over the brim. She found my father later that day and told him that they were going to move to Long Island immediately.

And they did. Every year since she forgot a little bit about that day. What was the name of the diner? Did she order a bagel with lox or just the coffee? Did she think it was Arabs or did the liberal centers of her cerebellum kick in to say "No no no it could have been anybody"? Did she want to kill someone? Drop an A-bomb on the entire Middle East? She didn't know anymore. All she remembered, and all I plucked out of her head, was her off-white coffee.

My father Daniel, on the other hand, didn't remember anything but the nuclear weapons. Dirty bombs, WMDs, suitcases filled with high-tech stuff; that was all he could think about. He took a job mopping floors at SUNY Riverhead so he could take classes for free. Physics. Mechanical engineering. His head was like an MTV video-all equations, blueprints, mushroom clouds, people running through the streets, and naked ladies, in and out-flipping from image to image. With every war Daniel got more frantic. The President would say some stuff about not ruling out nuclear weapons, and I could tell he wasn't kidding. My father would stay up all night, just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table. On the news, they kept showing more and more countries on a big map, painted red for evil. All of Latin America was red now and even the normal people in California died when someone ran the border with a bomb or shot down a plane over a neighborhood.

Dad read the newspapers, spent whole days in the library and all night on the computer. He was getting fat and losing his hair. He was a real nerd though, so nobody really noticed that he was slowly going mad. Actually, the problem was that he was going mad more slowly and in the opposite direction from everybody else. At night he dreamed of being stuck on an ice floe or on the wrong side of a shattered suspension bridge. Mom and I would be drifting off to sea on another ice floe or sliced in half by snapping steel cables. Then Dad would see the ghosts of firefighters and cops, white faces with no eyes, and they would point and laugh.

So Daniel studied. Researched. Thought of a way out.

Dad waited until I was out of school for the summer to make his big move, because he knew I would make a good assistant. He was laid off by SUNY because of budget cuts-Mom blamed his erratic behavior, but Daniel wasn't really any more eccentric than his other co-workers. He sold our nice car and bought a ratty old station wagon, and spent all day tooling around in it, while Geri clipped coupons and made us tuna fish with lots of mayonnaise for dinner. They didn't send me to genius camp that summer (I'm not really a genius, I just know what smart people are thinking) so that's how I ended up being Prince Herbert I of Weinbergia.

Dad woke me early one hot day, just as the sun was rising. He looked rumpled, but was really excited, almost twitching. I half expected to see a little neon sign blinking Krazy! Krazy! Krazy! on his big forehead like I did back when Lunch Lady Maribeth went nuts and started throwing pudding at school, but he was actually normal.

"C'mon Lovebug, I need your help," he said, shaking my ankle. He hadn't called me Lovebug since fourth grade, and his mind was going three thousand miles an hour, so I didn't know what he wanted.

"What is it?"

"We're going to the dump to look for cool stuff. C'mon, we'll get waffles at the diner on the way back."

I always wanted to go to the dump and look for cool stuff. I was really hoping to find something good like a big stuffed moose head or a highway traffic sign, but then in the car Dad told me that we were going to look for the ingredient that made America great.

"In fact, they call it Americium-241. It was isolated by the Manhattan Project, Herbert." Daniel loved to talk about the Manhattan Project.

"I don't think we're going to find that stuff at the dump, Dad."

"Smoke detectors, son. Most smoke detectors contain about half a gram of Americium-241," he said with the sort of dad-ly smile you usually just see on TV commercials.

"How many grams do you want?"

"Well, 750 grams is necessary to achieve critical mass, but we'll want more than that to get a bigger boom," he said. He was thinking about turning on his blinker and how much smoother the ride in the old car was, not about blowing anything up. "I guess we'll need about 5000 smoke detectors."

"Uh ..."

"Don't worry. I don't plan on finding all of them today."

He pulled the car into the dump and gave me a pair of gloves and a garbage bag. It was still early morning so the dump hadn't started getting hot and stinky yet. Dad let me go off on my own too, so we could cover more ground. I bet Mom or a social worker would have complained that Dad wasn't worried enough about my safety, but really, he was. As far as he was concerned, the safest place in the world was in a garbage dump, digging around for radioactive smoke detectors.

There wasn't all that much cool stuff at the dump, mostly just big bags of rotting food and milk containers, and broken Barbie Dream Houses-lots of those for some reason. There were old computers too. I liked checking out the motherboards and the stickers the college kids plastered on the side of their old monitors, but I couldn't find any moose heads or old hockey sticks or valuable comic books that some angry mother threw out or any smoke detectors. Mostly, people just leave them up on the wall, even if they don't work anymore.

I was playing around in this neat car I found that had a steering wheel that still moved around when Dad came running up with his own garbage bag. He'd found like twenty. "How many ya get, Lovebug?" he asked, then he frowned and mentally counted to ten when he saw the empty bag next to me. "Herbie, we really need to find these materials. Did you even look?!"

I shrugged. "It's hard. What do you want me to do? I can't look everywhere all at once."

He waved me out of the car. "C'mon. You just have to go about it systematically." He walked to the closest pile of garbage and then started going through it, one bag at a time. We poured through all the bags in one pile, tossing aside the smaller white plastic bags full of disgusting toilet paper, cardboard boxes with pictures of lasagna and fried chicken on them, newspapers from last week with headlines about the White Menace (Canada), gloppy leftover food mess sprinkled with white maggots, and all sorts of other junk. And then I found a smoke detector, at the top of the tenth bag we opened. Daniel gave me a big hug for that. "Now you can do the rest of this pile yourself. I'll be in that quadrant over there." Saying "quadrant" made him feel military.

Long Islanders are pigs. I found another smoke detector in the middle of a greasy pound of red spaghetti, but that was it. Everything else was just gross, from the moldy bathroom rugs to little baby clothes smeared in grease. Dad found me a bit later, his bag a little fuller. "Scored twelve all together. Let's get home, quickly now."

And that's what we did every morning. There was new garbage every day, plus there was always a chance we had missed something. Daniel printed out a list of things that might have some Americium-241 in them. Smoke detectors, and some medical testing equipment, and moisture density gauges all use the stuff.

"You know what a moisture density gauge looks like, Lovebug?" Dad asked me one morning.

I read his mind, then told him.

"You're such a smart boy."

We didn't find any moisture density gauges at the dump, but we did find some cool-looking stuff from the public hospital. They'd lost beds due to budget cuts. As the days wore on, we had more competition in the dump. Daniel was the only one after smoke detectors, but some poor people were spending their days at the dump, looking for old shoes or funny lamps or computer monitors to sell on eBay. I saw one guy cart away a giant bag full of stiff old bagels. Even he didn't know what he was planning on doing with them, but I could just picture his family in a dumpy living room: the kids all had dirty faces and crooked teeth, their little fists wrapped around mismatched forks and knives, and they wore white napkins around their necks like bibs. Then their dad would walk in and pour all the bagels onto the middle of the door he had put up on sawhorses to use as a table, and they'd all dive in at once, screaming, "FOOD!" It was so funny.

One of the poor people got really upset because he was poor and took it out on me, yelling and screaming that I was stealing garbage from his spot. Daniel came running, ready to tackle the guy but stopped, frozen with fear, when the poor guy picked up a rusty muffler and swung it over his head. "I'm a workin' man!" he shouted, "I'm working here in the dump, trying to get some food for my family." Inside his mind I could see him turning over, going from normal to crazy. The dump guys finally came out of the trailer where they watch TV all day with some crowbars to chase him off.

Most of the poor people were normal though. They were used to being poor, but just started coming to the dump because they had gotten poorer after the taxes went up or after they lost their job at a gas station. The worst poor people were the ones who used to have money. They really went crazy. I hoped that after Daniel became afraid we'd stop going to the dump, but he really wanted that Americium- 241. We just went earlier in the day, while the poor people were still asleep on their couches, dreaming along with an infomercial or the national anthem on TV. It was fine after that, except for one time a black lady yelled at me for stepping on a pie plate she thought was a collector's item.

It took all month to get 5000 smoke detectors, plus a few things from the hospital. Daniel spread them out over the basement and put me to work plucking the little silver bit of Americium-241 out of each of the detectors. I wore a nose mask that Daniel wasn't sure would work, rubber gloves, a smock. I used tweezers and a big magnifying glass connected to the table. Daniel worked on the other end of the basement-we kept the material in different piles so it wouldn't achieve critical mass and kill us.

The day Geri was laid off she nearly found out what were up to. Her sadness and anger preceded her into the driveway by nearly a minute, so I told Dad that I heard the car and we rushed upstairs, just in time to slam the door to the basement behind us and nonchalantly stand in front of it, while still wearing our masks and smocks.

"Hi boys," Mom said. She carried a cardboard box fill of little doodads from her cubicle with her. A frame with a picture of me from the two weeks I was in Little League stuck out of the top. Her misery evaporated as she took us in. "What are you two doing?"

"Ships in bottles!" Dad said.

"Model trains!" I said, because that is what Dad was thinking right before he changed his mind.

"Ships in bottles ..." he started.

"They make up the body of the model trains, you see," I explained to Mom. "I'm learning how to reduce the resonant vibrations by altering the track gauge so the bottles don't chip or crack."

"Indeed," said Dad.

Genius stuff, thought Mom, then she said, "I lost my job today. No severance package." She tried another smile. "I hope these shipping trains in bottles aren't too expensive."

"They're not, dear."

"I got a grant from the Department of Defense!" I said. They laughed at that, Dad a little too hard.

I slipped down to the basement to let my parents have their fight about money in peace.

I was getting pretty bored with the dump and a rat almost bit Daniel, so we stopped going. Dad continued to leave early in the day, leaving me with Geri, who started vacuuming the carpets a lot. I mean she did it every day. She called me downstairs to move the furniture and everything. Daniel got me a reprieve one day by taking me with him to the UPS building. I waited by the loading dock with him.

"What are we waiting for? Did you buy a bunch of smoke detectors?" I asked him so he wouldn't know I knew that he bought commercial grade uranium online.

"No, I bought commercial grade uranium online. Perfectly legal." About ten minutes later, he signed for his uranium and put the box in the trunk of his car. Then we drove to the FedEx shipping center a few blocks away. There he answered to "Jerry Wallace," Mom's maiden name, and quickly flashed her old passport that he had put his picture on and then re-laminated to claim another box. That one went on my lap for the drive home. I wasn't too happy about that because it was heavy and radioactive. Since the sample was only twenty percent Uranium-235 I didn't have to be that worried, but you know, testicles.

He parked the car a block from the house and we cut through the Pasalquas' so that we ended up on the side of the house. I squirmed through the basement window Daniel left open, then dropped down the floor. Daniel walked the block back to get the first box, which I placed against the western wall, and then the second box, which I put against the opposite wall. Our Americium-241 loads were north and south, of course. Upstairs, Geri was watching one of those shows where your neighbor paints your living room orange.

Once we had the uranium, we were back in business. I pretended to join the chess club so that Daniel and I could drive around to get the rest of our supplies. Ever since the ferry across the sound to Bridgetown exploded thanks to sabotage, downtown Port Jameson was really suffering economically, so it was easy to buy some hydrofluoric acid from the glass etching guy, except that he was napping when we came by so we had to bang on the doors till he woke up. We poured it over our samples to make uranium tetrafluoride. I'm not a genius or anything, I'm just telling you what Dad was thinking. He got the recipe out of some old hippie magazine called Seven Days, and his schooling took care of the details.

Anyway, getting to uranium tetrafluoride was the easy part. The basement's ventilation was too poor to handle the fluorine gas we would need to create uranium hexafluoride, and once we got that we still had to separate the U-235 we needed from the junk U-238. The hippie magazine was no help there. It said: "Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about forty-five minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor." That's funny because except for this one thing, the article wasn't a joke.

Dad thought he could sneak into his old job, but security was tightened after the tuition riots, and all his old cronies had also been laid off and escorted from campus. They didn't even get to pack up their stuff-their little toys and family photos were mailed to them afterwards. Our uranium tetrafluoride wasn't exactly improving with age either. The next morning, Geri was at her networking club downtown. Dad checked me for hair loss and melanoma, made me some eggs, and then left in the car. Two hours later he came back home on foot and with shoes full of smelly hundred dollar bills. In the basement, Dad handed me a copper pipe and told me to smack him in the head with it, hard, but not too hard, a few times.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas Copyright © 2006 by Nick Mamatas. Excerpted by permission.
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