I would like to express my most ardent gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation for the time to put this book together and write these new poems. I would also like to thank the Florida State College of Arts and Sciences for support during my Guggenheim year and the editors of the following magazines for publishing these poems:
New Poems: Agni: “17 Dollars” and “Ode to Wasting Time and Drawing Donatello's David”; American Poetry Review: “Ode to Forgetting the Year” and “Ode to Knots, Noise, Waking Up at Three, and Falling Asleep Reading to My Id”; Five Points: “On the Street of Divine Love” and “I'm Making Walt Whitman Soup”; Ploughshares: “Ode to the Messiah, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Don't Believe” and “Ode to the Triple”; Plume: “How to Pray”; Poem-A-Day (published online by the Academy of American Poets): “Ode to Lil’ Kim”; Southern Review: “Ode to Red and Speedy” and “Reading Can Kill You”; Spillway: “Questions for My Body”; Subtropics: “Ode to Augurs, Ogres, Acorns, and Two or Three Things That Have Been Eating at My Heart Like a Wolverine in a Time of Famine”; Yale Review: “Ode to Skimpy Clothes and August in the Deep South.”
Delirium (University of North Texas Press, 1995): Another Chicago Magazine: “The Language of Bees”; Iowa Review: “St. Anthony of the Floating Larynx” and “Toska”; Ledge: “Ova” and “Betrothal in B Minor”; Paris Review: “Delirium” and “Nose”; Western Humanities Review: “St. Clare's Underwear.”
The Alphabet of Desire (New York University Press, 1999): Five Points: “Ode to the Lost Luggage Warehouse at the Rome Airport”; Kenyon Review: “Thinking of Galileo”; Paris Review: “Ode to Untoward Dreams”; Parnassus: “Achtung, My Princess, Goodnight”; Southern Review: “The Dream of the Red Drink,” and “So Long, Roy”; Southern Poetry Review: “The Word”; Western Humanities Review: “Ode on My Wasted Youth.”
Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004): Boulevard: “Ode to American English”; Five Points: “Ode to Barbecue”; Indiana Review: “Thus Spake the Mockingbird”; Meridian: “Ode on Satan's Power”; Ploughshares: “My Translation” and “Idolatry”; Runes: “O Deceitful Tongue”; Southern Review: “Ode to Hardware Stores” and “Ode to My 1977 Toyota.”
All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009): Five Points: “Ode on My 45s, Insomnia, and My Poststructuralist Superego” and “Some Days I Feel Like Janet Leigh”; Indiana Review: “Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris”; Nightsun: “The Fool Hath Said in His Heart,” “Hear My Prayer,” and “I Beseech Thee, O Yellow Pages”; Pool: “Mambo Cadillac”; Salmagundi: “Working at Pam-Pam's”; Subtropics: “Ode on Dictionaries”; TriQuarterly: “Betty Boop's Bebop,” “Karen, David, and I Stop in Front of the Pitti Palace,” “Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory,” “Ode on the Letter M,” and “Zeus, It's Your Leda, Sweetie Pie”; Verse: “Ganymede Dreams of Rosaline,” and “Nietzsche Explains the Übermench to Lois Lane.”
And thanks to the following editors for reprinting the following poems:
“Ode to the Lost Luggage Warehouse at the Rome Airport” in Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove and David Lehman, Scribners, 2001; “Delirium” in The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953, Picador, 2003; “Ode to American English” and “Ode on My 1977 Toyota” in Good Poems for Hard Times, edited by Garrison Keillor, Viking, 2005; “Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris” in Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner and David Lehman, Scribners, 2010; “Ganymede Dreams of Rosaline,” “Nietzsche Explains the Übermench to Lois Lane” in Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman, Scribners, 2011; “Mambo Cadillac” and “Ode to Hardware Stores” were in Good Poems American Places, edited by Garrison Keillor, Viking, 2011; “Thinking of Galileo” and “Hatred” in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, Penguin, 2011; Garrison Keillor read “Ode to American English” (October 14, 2006) and “Mambo Cadillac” (May 7, 2011) on his radio show Prairie Home Companion—I try not to hold it against him that his readings got a lot more laughs than mine do.
I hope Rimbaud lovers will forgive my very free translation at the beginning of this book.
As always I must thank my husband, David Kirby, for the blissful life he has set up for us and for always being smart and ready for fun, and especially for having the travel bug, too. I love being on the road with you, darling, whether it's our street or Outer Mongolia.
Stuart Riordan and I have collaborated for more than twenty years. She took the photograph for the cover of my first book, and her painting graces the cover of this book. I am so grateful for our ongoing conversation about the artistic process.
Florida State University's Study Abroad Program has been our travel agent as many of these poems will attest. Thank you to Mark Pietralunga and Karen Myers for many sublime summers in Italy. Also, thanks to Cynie Cory for helping me order the new poems in this book. And Albert Goldbarth, Tony Hoagland, Barbara Ras and Susan Wood for being friends indeed.
Magazine editors have been my reality check all through my writing life. When they are excited, then I know I am on to something, and when they send a poem back over and over I begin to have doubts about it. I thank you all, but especially Richard Howard, David Bottoms, Megan Sexton, Michael Griffith, Susan Hahn, Michael Keller, Herb Leibowitz, and Andrew Zawacki.
I also would like to thank Ed Ochester and the staff at the University of Pittsburgh Press. I am so grateful that my work has found such a home.
This book is dedicated to my sister, who is a brilliant artist, indefatigable party girl, and has the biggest heart in the world. Little did I know that the girl I shared a room with for so long would turn out to be my dearest friend.