The folks on the Buffalo List have been circulating emails about the NEA results for poetry grants. Apparently rejection letters have been mailed (oy - a second ago I typed "failed", instead of "mailed"). This was my first year applying for one, and like everyone else who applied, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the results, and extra anxious, because of my screwy mail situation which has resulted from mail/identity theft and which makes me question everything about the U.S. postal service. Anyways, after reading about the NEA thread on Buffalo I went to bed last night and promptly had a nightmare. Boy was it terrible. I dreamed I got a big fat rejection PACKAGE which included handwritten notes from the 4 jurors who read and evaluated my application. Several of them commented on the unprofessional job I had done on assembling my package, laughing at what I had put a lot of hard work and thought into. The clincher was that as my eye ran down the list of jurors it fell upon the name and handwriting of a young poet from Ohio who I met at MacDowell in 2003 who embodied self-interest, deception, sharkiness, gossip and contentiousness. And this poet had left me some rather mean and dismissive notes on my work. Hey - I thought the process was supposed to be anonymous! I woke up quite distraught and didn't remember the dream until I was reading the new comments on the NEA thread at Buffalo and thought, wow, this is really familiar. The Buffalo group have some interesting thoughts on the NEA process, prize winners, sensibilities and also touch on the Guggenheim process - all illuminating stuff.