No sleep till Denver, baby

Things that are fun:

It's always fun to get a poem accepted (even more fun when they take several poems - thanks, diode!) but there's nothing quite like the feeling of finally getting an email that starts out "We'd like to take..." from a journal you've been submitting to for almost twenty years. I say this not because I'm bragging about publication (in the grand scheme of things, getting a poem into a journal is just not that huge a deal) but because many of y'all will understand, I think. Persistence really does pay off sometimes; also, it really is true that you get more poems accepted when you actually make the effort of sending poems out. So yeah, Field is taking a poem, and I'm ever so slightly over the moon about it.

To make it even more fun, David Young was here in Bloomington for a reading today, so I had the pleasure of introducing myself and thanking him in person. And his reading was good, too. He read a few poems from his recent book of translations, and then a bunch of poems from Black Lab, which I just read a few days ago and quite enjoyed.

Then I dashed home, fed the cats, put on my boots, and dashed back out to Rachael's Cafe where I was one of two openers for the Reservoir Dogwoods. I didn't know many people in the audience, and it's always fun to read for new people. And I enjoyed the Dogwoods; they are all four very good readers/performers (in the "spoken word artist" tradition) so they were fun to watch. They also did several ensemble pieces that actually worked quite nicely. That kind of thing can be tough to pull off, but the four poets had voices and stage presences that worked well together, and it made me think it'd be fun to try and do something similar with some of my poet friends sometime. Maybe.

Things that are not so much fun: In about six hours I have to get in the car and head for the airport, and my house is a disaster. And why no, I haven't packed yet. So it's time for me to put down the Internet and back slooooowly away.