Luck

Major props to Lucia Perillo, who just won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award ($100,000). I may have mentioned before that I took a workshop with her at the Indiana U. Writers' Conference a few years back -- in 2002, I think -- and enjoyed her a great deal. She kept talking about mystery, and wanting poems to have some mystery in them; I think this was exactly what I needed to hear at the time. Certainly it's one way to start looking at a poem, whether someone else's that you're trying to understand or your own that you're trying to revise: where is the mystery in this poem? how does the poem embrace or try to escape its own mystery?

Anyway, I'm tickled that she has won this award. Her new(ish) book, Luck is Luck, is worth a read (as are her others).

EDITED TO ADD: Here is David Kirby's review of Luck is Luck, from the New York Times.

Locally, all I can say is that it's damned cold. I know you people in Minnesota and environs have it colder, but I stayed in my warm bed (heated mattress pad, flannel sheets, down comforter, another comforter, and two warm cats) as long as I could stand it this morning, and it was still only 10 degrees outside when I got up. Now (almost 9 pm) it's back down to 10 again, though with lots of bright sunshine it wasn't too ungodly awful this afternoon at around 16 degrees. I ran around town a bit doing some retail therapy today (FOUR new pairs of socks!); had brunch at the Runcible Spoon, where I spent some time writing in my journal outlining a manuscript I want to put together -- taking a long-ass poem I'm having trouble working with as a cohesive whole and breaking it into fragments, which will be interpolated with other related and semi-unrelated poems. Could be interesting, I think.

But now I'm in for the evening, in my house which although cold and drafty is at least warmer than it is outside. I've got a heated throw blanket and a down throw blanket over me here on the couch, along with a very large fluffy cat on my lap who pretty much serves as a throw blanket all by himself, and a hat on my head (yes, inside the house -- it's cold in here, and my heating bills have been painful this winter so I'm not turning that thing up past 58). I've got the Olympics on TV, and a couple of books & journals close at hand, in addition to this laptop. I've been reading Floyd Skloot's memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, which includes some interesting meditations on personal/family history, brain injury (he suffered a viral infection of the brain that left him quite neurologically disabled), the nature of memory, the nature of self, and the way all of that influences language. It's quite a fascinating book. I'm not terribly familiar with his poetry, but after reading this book I think I will find some of that and read it.

Stay warm, y'all.