New Blog

I won't be posting to this blog anymore—new posts will appear on the new site.

Resolutions for 2013

It's hard to believe the year's almost over. A ton has happened since last January, so this blog post is mostly to get it all down on (electronic) paper, organize my thoughts, and start prioritizing for the New Year.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2012

I learned to program. I mean really learned. I'd taught myself a bit of JavaScript and Python the year before; I learned some Java in college; at varying points in my childhood I played around with Logo, HTML/CSS, and TI-BASIC. In the last twelve months, I've gone from knowing relatively little to understanding Python and JavaScript (though the latter still manages to surprise me somewhat regularly) and feeling proficient in (though not yet a native speaker of) Ruby and C. I even learned a bit of Haskell!

I started a new job. In late August, I left Random House (where I'd worked for exactly four years) and took a job with Codecademy. While I owe a great deal to RH and I miss the people there, I now get to help teach the world to program. How cool is that?

I published well. I'm enormously grateful to be able to say my poems appeared in The New Yorker, Denver Quarterly, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, and Crazyhorse in 2012. Huge thanks to the editors of those journals/magazines, my teachers, and all the fantastic poets and writers I had the opportunity to work with during my MFA.

I read lots of good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

• The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn
• Northerners by Seth Abramson
• Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer
• The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa
• Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner
• The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner
• Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey
• Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
• Things are Happening by Joshua Beckman
• Flies by Michael Dickman
• The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane
• Fancy Beasts by Alex Lemon
• The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau
• Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner
• Litany for the City by Ryan Teitman
• Collected Poems by Lynda Hull

Programming

• Code Complete (2nd Edition) by Steve McConnell
• The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
• The Mythical Man-Month (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
• JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
• Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
• Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate
• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff

GOALS FOR 2013

Become a better programmer. There's still a ton of stuff I want to learn, both about the technologies and languages I've already picked up and a thousand other things I didn't have the time to tackle in 2012. The big ones:

• More about Ruby, particularly metaprogramming in Ruby
• More about JavaScript (which will likely involve plowing through the gargantuan JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan)
• Twitter Bootstrap
• Algorithms and data structures (backfilling some of my missing CS knowledge)
• The UNIX operating system, including bash and zsh
• More about relational database systems, as well as their alternatives (e.g. MongoDB)
• Information security
• Functional programming style, likely through Haskell or F♯
• Memory management in C and x86 assembly

Have my first full-length book accepted for publication. I have a couple of manuscripts ready and I think they're where I want them to be, so now it's the ongoing game of musical chairs: matching the book to a publisher before the music stops. (If it stops, it stops, & I'll try again in 2014.)

Learn to shave with a straight razor. After thinking about it for a year or two, I finally went out and bought a razor and strop. After watching a billion YouTube videos demonstrating how to do everything from set up and care for the razor itself to actually shaving with it, I'm reasonably sure I can learn not to maim myself with it in a couple of weeks, and actually be pretty adept with it in just a few months.

Learn more about coffee. I started grinding my own coffee this year and learned a lot about drip brewing. Thanks to friends at work who are much more knowledgeable than me, I also learned a fair amount about espresso. In 2013, I'd like to try out some more brewing methods/types of coffee & learn more about what makes a great cup.

Rebuild my website from the ground up with Twitter Bootstrap. I'd like to incorporate this blog into it, too. I'm not sure a full-fledged Rails app is necessary, but I think something more lightweight (like Express or Sinatra) might be a good solution.

Publish more poems. I've been writing up a storm the last week or so, and I'm ready to hit the ground running come January.

Read more good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

• Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young
• Poems 1962 – 2012 by Louise Glück
• The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
• The Best American Poetry 2012 edited by Mark Doty
• Later Poems Selected and New: 1971 – 2012 by Adrienne Rich
• Quick Question by John Ashbery
• Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker
• Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
• Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds
• Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky

Programming

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson et al. (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler et al.
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma et al.
• Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen
• Introduction to Algorithms (2nd Edition) by Thomas Cormen et al.
• Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta et al.
• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas
• Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (2nd Edition) by Jon Erickson
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (2nd Edition) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Regular Expressions Cookbook by Jan Goyvaerts & Steven Levithan
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser
• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipovača
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
• Pro Git by Scott Chacon
• Practical Vim by Drew Neil
• Ruby Best Practices by Gregory T. Brown
• The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)

Guest Blogging at Ploughshares

I'll be guest blogging weekly (every Wednesday) over at the Ploughshares blog from now until April. Check out my first post!

New Poem!

...forthcoming in The Southern Review this spring. Details TK!

In fact, lots of things TK. I've been horribly remiss in my blogging lately; more soon.

Updates, &c

Two quick updates—

• I've recently been named a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. I'm enormously thankful to the individual readers and the Poetry Foundation overall for selecting me as a finalist, and many thanks to those of you who have wished me luck for the final round. Fingers crossed!

• One of my poems will be appearing in a future issue of The New York Quarterly—details TK.

Current Soundtrack

"Fake Palindromes," Andrew Bird
"Keep the Car Running," Arcade Fire
"Holland, 1945," Neutral Milk Hotel
"Fake Empire," The National
"Deck Space," Kenin
"Calamity Song," The Decemberists
"Rappaport vs. The Jet (That Bombed the Grocery Store)," Panic Strikes a Chord
"Mistaken for Strangers," The National
"Long December," Counting Crows
"The General," Dispatch
"We Intertwined," The Hush Sound
"Cathedrals," Jump Little Children
"Teardrop," Massive Attack
"New Hampshire," Matt Pond PA
"Down by the Water," The Decemberists
"Wine Red," The Hush Sound
"Such Great Heights," The Postal Service
"New Slang," The Shins

Recently Read/Currently (Re)Reading

Sum, David Eagleman—superb and imaginative, but not as mindblowing as I'd expected.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner—I'd forgotten how disorienting the first thirty or so pages are.

The Iliad, Homer—fantastic, but not as good (and, frankly, not as exciting) as The Odyssey. (I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation.)

While Mortals Sleep, Kurt Vonnegut—just started. This is his early, previously unpublished fiction, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's not nearly as good as his later work.

Fall Higher, Dean Young—just started. Impressions to come!

Forthcoming Poems

I recently found out I'll have poems forthcoming in Denver Quarterly (more details to come) and Ploughshares (2012). Exciting times!

Recent Poems

New poems in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Salt Hill.

Indiana Review also contains a review of Vivisection, and Salt Hill includes a mini-interview with me.

Sean Lovelace has a great "teensy review" of Vivisection up on HTML Giant, along with two other titles. Check it out!

Updated Reading Schedule

New and improved!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 7:30 pm: I'll be reading at the Happy Ending Lounge as part of the Southern Writers Reading Series (map here).

Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 3:00 pm: I'll be reading at Sunny's Bar as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series (map here).

Friday, September 30, 2011 at 7:00 pm: I'll be reading at Goodbye Blue Monday as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series (map here).

Upcoming Readings

Two upcoming readings this fall, everyone:

Sunny's Bar on Sunday, September 11th, 2011 at 3:00 pm as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series (map here).

Goodbye Blue Monday on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 7:00 pm as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series (map here).

Hope to see you there!

Utter Shamelessness

I've picked up a few extra copies of Vivisection from my publisher, so:

1. If you'd like to order a copy directly from me, e-mail me at eric (døt) q (døt) weinstein (åt) gmail (døt) com. The book is $9.00 + $2.00 S&H, PayPal or check. I'll even sign it! Which means it will one day be worth DOZENS.

2. If you'd like to review Vivisection, let me know at the above address and I'll send you a copy gratis.

Website Updated

Check it out!

Upcoming Readings

1. Friday, May 6th at KGB Bar as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series. (Map here.)

2. TBA (July) at Sunny's as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series. (Map here.)

3. Friday, September 30th at Goodbye Blue Monday as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series. (Map here.)

Hope to see you at one of them!

BWR Issue 37.2

The Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Black Warrior Review is available now. It is mega awesome and you should pick up four to seven copies. Immediately.

Website Up!

I've finally gotten around to setting up a personal website. You can find it here.

Decisions and Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse

I didn't do a lot of revision before starting my mfa. This isn't because I didn't see the value of revision; it simply didn't occur to me as necessary. Poems were accepted for publication or not accepted. If a poem didn't work, I set it aside. Sometimes I revisited or mined lines from it, but apart from that, that was pretty much it.

I still think revision can only be applied to certain poems and within certain spans of time. Some poems "go cold" and need to be completely molten down and recast. Some can be significantly strengthened by exchanging and replacing a few parts, or altering the structure.

Either way, I've been doing a lot more of it. Three of my most recent poems have benefited enormously from the workshop and from serious revision, which I think points to a couple of things.

1. I'm bringing the right things to workshop. I think the poems are less refined than what I'd like to bring, but that's probably the point. They engender discussion, which I think is good. I'm learning to be less attached to something just because I put it on a page. Which leads to my belief that:

2. I'm getting better at revision. I'm more willing to cut something apart once it's written down, whereas I used to roll poems around in my head for weeks or months before committing them to paper. Once they were made corporeal—"made flesh," to borrow from Craig Arnold—I rarely changed them. I think going through several drafts has improved some (but not all) of my poems. Meaning:

3. I'm getting better at knowing what to revise and how. Some poems, as I mentioned, need to be entirely recast, otherwise later alterations will look "scotch-taped on" (thanks, Billy Collins). Others can have parts swapped out, and still others can benefit immensely from a small change in structure, syntax, or word choice. I also think this has to happen in a certain temporal or emotional space, meaning (finally):

4. Revision only works insofar as it's an actual "re-visioning" of the original poem. A revised poem has to get closer to what the original poem was driving at. It has to be clearer, leaner, more complete (whether by the omission, exchange, or addition of words/ideas). In order to accomplish this kind of revision, I find I can neither be too close nor too far from the poem, either temporally and emotionally. Too near the poem, and I can't be objective; too far removed, and I can't return to the state I was in when I originally wrote it. I may betray the poem in this way.

Overall, I think I'm getting better. I have, in large part, my cohort and professors to thank for that.

New Poems

Three of my poems, "Quarry Song," "Charting the Apartment," and "Love Machine" will appear in issue #27 of Salt Hill Journal (due out in May).

(Next) Next Reading

I'll be reading at KGB Bar on Friday, May 6th at 7:00 pm as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series (map here).

Panel on Borderland (Poem)

...can be read here at the Massachusetts Review website.