Odds & Ends

A few carryovers from 2010:

Though I've shared the full-length interview I filmed with Poets & Writers for their 40th Anniversary, I'd never linked to the amalgamate video that they showed at their big gala dinner, which I got to attend this past March. The P&W folks just posted it a few weeks ago, so it is linked below. To be sitting in the ballroom of Manhattan's Capitale and see my face pop up alongside the talking heads of A. M Homes, Roxana Robinson, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Straub...to look over at the neighboring table and see Tom Wolfe (in his white ice-cream suit) watching the screen on which I was yapping away...holy hell. One of the highlights of my life.



Also, Square Books just announced their list of 2010 Bestselling Books, and I Was the Jukebox snuck intot he mix--spot #100, to be exact. For a poetry book to clamber its way up among the Barry Hannahs and the Curtis Wilkies is kind of miraculous. I love those guys. I love that town.

I go to New York tomorrow to meet the publicist who has been assigned by Crown. She works on books by Frances Mayes! I vote that if my memoir merits a sequel, it be something like "How I Survived Eating Pasta in Every Town of Italy." The research would be brutal, sure, but somehow I would summon the strength to carry on.