Bloom (the Bloomington one)

So the article on the Bloomington poetry scene is in the new issue of Bloom: Celebrating Life in Bloomington (not to be confused with the other, more literary Bloom). It's not, after all, the cover story -- the cover story is "Bloomington is a Dog's Town," with a picture of a Great Pyrenees. Cute puppydog vs. buncha surly poets: can't say as how I'd argue with that decision. *grin*

Anyhow, it's a nice little article, featuring brief interviews with & poems by Tony Brewer, Catherine Bowman, Roger Mitchell, Patricia Coleman, Jenny Kander, and myself. I am going to try to pick up a few extras (the place where I picked mine up today only had four copies sitting there, and I didn't want to clean them out entirely). It's distributed free here in town, so if anyone would be interested in having a copy, I'd be happy to just send it; if you want to send me a buck or two to help with postage (it's a big, glossy, 112-page magazine), or a spare copy of a poetry journal in exchange, that would be lovely. I'm not sure how many extras I will be able to snag, so I'll make it first come, first served. Email me with your mailing address.

(Shana Ritter, who wrote the article, has always gotten confused about which northern Indiana town I grew up in; in this article she claims that I am from Fort Wayne, which is not true. I have never set foot in the undoubtedly-lovely *cough* thriving metropolis of Fort Wayne. Just for the record.)

* * * * *

Did you see the Seattle Times feature on local poets? Did you listen to the audio clips of Peter Pereira reading his poems "Anagrammer" and "Dream of the Cancer Cure"? Did it occur to you, as it did to me, that NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday should do a feature on Peter's anagram poetry to go along with the weekly Will Shortz puzzle thing? If so, or if you're saying "wow, that didn't occur to me, but now that you mention it, that is a brilliant idea!", you too can contact NPR to suggest the story idea. Just, you know, a suggestion. :)

* * * * *

Still on track with NaPoWriMo, though the past few days haven't yielded anything that feels much like a keeper. I may post more snippets eventually, though. I do like one of my titles: "History & Theory of Basements." The poem basically sucks, but I like the title.

Farewell to Vonnegut

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

----Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007. So it goes.

Yo yo dawg, so check it out...

...okay, none of the Indiana Arts Commission panelists acted like American Idol judges, but wouldn't it have been kinda fun if they had?

Seriously, I drove up to Indianapolis today to sit in on the IAC Literature panel, and I am so glad I did, and so glad the process permits that kind of openness -- it was a fabulous learning experience. I got there a bit late and missed the first few applications, but I heard most of them. There were four panelists, a moderator and a coordinator and a tech guy; the discussion of each application was kicked off by the first reader, who presented their evaluation (generally reading from something they'd written out), and then the discussion opened up. Some of the applications didn't take very long to discuss, including a couple which were immediately deemed "no-brainers" (as in "we'd be crazy not to fund this"). Some received more in-depth discussion and, in a couple of cases, some back-and-forth that may have swayed some panelists' evaluations. There was a big three-ring binder with all the applications available for the audience members to peruse, which was really nice.

All in all it was VERY interesting, and from what I could tell, I think the panelists did a good job of getting right to the point and picking out the most important points of each application, positive and negative. They weren't brutal, but they didn't hesitate to "get real" (as Randy Jackson would say) -- one panelist said about one application, "I suggest that you should get to be a writer before you apply." Ouch! Some of the day's recurring themes:

• Timeline. Several people were proposing to write entire novels in the course of the grant period -- one had even included "marketing" as a line item in the budget, for a novel that hadn't really been started yet. The panelists consistently saw this kind of thing as "unrealistic" and overly optimistic.
  
• Preparedness. One writer with no publication credits & not that much experience in the genre of the proposal wanted funding to go to Bread Loaf; the panelists thought that being accepted there would be a challenge at this point in the writer's career, since Bread Loaf is highly competitive. If the writer had included a Plan B, perhaps a less selective workshop or conference, I think the proposal would have done better. They also liked to see writers who've already done some work on their own rather than applying for a grant too early; "writers need to make a commitment on their own before asking the State of Indiana to commit [financially] to them." It's also a very good idea to do your research, and really target what you're asking for -- if you want funding for a workshop, be careful to select a workshop that will give you something specific that you need for your project. For example, they really liked that I'm planning to take a workshop on revision, because that shows I've thought about what I most need help with and what will move me towards my goal. (That's exactly why I chose Carl Phillips' workshop at FAWC over other, equally attractive-sounding workshops -- I thought it fit best with my overall plan. I'm so glad the panelists agreed!)
  
• Along similar lines, don't ask for funding for something that won't push you forward to the next level in your writing. One writer wanted to take a workshop that the panelists felt was "beneath her" -- that she was already doing quite nicely in this area and the workshop wasn't going to benefit her enough to justify the expense.
• Professionalism. It should be obvious that if you're asking for money to write, then you should make damn sure the writing in your application is good. This means: spell things right. Also, be professional in the sense that you know something about how the writing world works; this goes along with selecting the right workshop if you want a workshop, knowing when mentoring is appropriate and helpful, etc.
  
• Specificity. Whatever you're requesting funding for -- is it the best way to get what you need? Be clear about what you intend to derive from the workshop, retreat time, travel, whatever you're asking for -- and make sure that is the best option for you. Don't ask for funding for an elaborate writing retreat, office space, etc. when what you really need to do is just sit down at your kitchen table and make yourself write. Grant funding is no substitute for self-discipline and initiative.
  
• Overall -- what they wanted to see most of all is GOALS that are clearly stated, appropriate to the project and to the current stage of the writer's career, and realistic. And provide evidence that shows you will be able to follow through on your proposal. "We should spend our money on artists who have a track record that indicates they can take the next step." "There are so many wonderful ideas, but we need evidence that the person can make them happen."
  

I suspect that most of those points are going to be relevant in any artistic grant proposal, not just here in Indiana -- so I hope that sharing them will be helpful to someone else. A lot of it seems like it should be common sense, but apparently -- not so much. ;)

Without going into embarrassing detail, I will say that my application seems to have met with a fair amount of support. I wasn't one of the "no-brainers" but I got some very positive, very encouraging feedback. One panelist said that the work I'd submitted wasn't his cup of tea, but that he did see that it was good and "worthy of attention" -- I can definitely live with that. One thing they particularly liked was that I was quite specific, in each phase of my proposed project, about what "success" would mean. There were 18 applicants in literature, and about 230 overall, with enough money for 40 grants -- so it's very competitive. I won't know until June whether or not I get a grant, but I feel hopeful. And even if I don't, I can rest easy knowing that nobody laughed my little application out of the room, that I was in the right ballpark.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a little orangey cat who's just flung himself headlong into my lap and flopped over onto his back for a bit of a belly rub. Speaking of clearly stated, realistic goals. *grin*

Divertimento with the translation*

Today's NaPo amusement: I took a poem of mine (older, pretty much finished) and ran it through Babelfish. I translated it from English to Italian to French and back into English, and then took the resulting fractured mess and edited it just enough to make it sound halfway like a poem. Maybe I'll post some snippets later on this week. It actually did -- as this exercise often does -- give me a new perspective on what I originally wrote, and turned up a few interesting phrases I may cannibalize for something someday.

Tomorrow: to Indianapolis, for the Arts Commission's peer-review panel in Literature. I'm nervous, oddly. I keep reminding myself that I won't know for sure about the grant for another couple months. But I'm sure I will learn a lot tomorrow. Should be fun.
__________
*"Fun With Translation" taken from English to Italian to French to Dutch to English

Snippetology

A very happy Easter to those who celebrate.

For the rest of us ... happy "day before half-price Peeps & chocolate bunnies" day! :D

* * * * *

Day 5:

Later, naked and rosy,
sheltered from the frost, she blooms.
_____

Day 6:

He is cello when he sleeps,
a bow with insufficient rosin.
_____

Day 7:

I live here
because I believe in the changes . . .
_____

Day 8 (a two-fer!):

It's these small deaths
that chip away at faith.
Let me be
like all those robins . . .

---

It's the thinnest skin,
this dam
that holds the grieving in.

* * * * *

Did anyone else see the recent Nova episode about cuttlefish? Whoa. Amazing, amazing critters. I had no idea!

More snippets

Day 3:

Brain muzzy as tent caterpillars
in the rain . . .

Day 4:

Midnight, sometimes, I've bees in my blood. They shiver me,
buzz and honey me till I give up on sleep.
I'd choose clover if I could . . .

* * * * *
Yesterday: 79 degrees, with a ferocious thunderstorm in the afternoon.
Today: 31 degrees, blustery, with the tiniest of snow flurries.
Crazy.

Your tax dollars at work

(Well, if you're a Hoosier, anyway.)

Today the Indiana Arts Commission sent me all the details about the review panel for Individual Artist Grant applicants in Literature, which happens next week. I don't have to go, and if I'm there I'm not allowed to talk to the panelists about my application or pipe up with any clarifications or anything. It'll be kind of like a workshop, where I just have to sit there and listen even if I feel like my work is being misinterpreted or whatever. Well, I've been in enough workshops, goodness knows, so it won't be an altogether unfamiliar experience. I think I will learn a lot by listening to the discussion -- not just of my application but of the other Literature applicants as well. If my application is unsuccessful, I'll probably get a much clearer idea of what it takes to write a better one. And I will get to learn about what some other writers around the state are up to, what kind of projects they've proposed. So, I do plan to go. I'm nervous about it though, which kind of surprises me.

The panel is scheduled to run from 10 am to 3 pm, in downtown Indianapolis -- I'll need to allow an hour and a half travel time each way. Only the Literature applicants will be discussed that day; there are separate panels for the other genres such as visual art, crafts, music, etc. There are 18 applicants in literature, and mine will be the 16th application reviewed. (Yikes ... I hope the panelists aren't totally burned out by that point.) The grants themselves are not limited by genre; they have x amount of money to give out in $2000 chunks, and each application gets a numerical score from the panel in the appropriate genre. After all the panels have convened, then they take all the highest scoring applications and award grants to them. Then they go to the next highest ones and award them, and so on till they run out of money. So I'm not just competing with the other writers, but with ALL the other applicants. My understanding is that they'll be able to award about 40 grants total. I didn't count up how many applicants there were but maybe a couple hundred? Yikes.

So I won't know for sure about the grant until the Commission convenes in, I think, June sometime. But next week I will at least know what score my application received; if it's under a certain point I know for sure I'm out of the running, and if it's super high I will feel confident of having a good chance.

The material I received today actually included the names of all the applicants, in all the genres, which is pretty cool. I recognized three or four of the writers' names; the fact that the list wasn't jam-packed with really well-known people feels like a hopeful sign to me, though. I recognized a smattering of names from the other genres too, including a singer-songwriter who has performed extensively with John Prine -- so yeah, there is definitely some tough competition for these awards. I don't really like the idea of "competition" in art, but there you have it.

Whatever happens, though, putting together the application was a very good experience for me. It made me sit down and outline what I need to do to make this particular project happen, and for that matter, it made me think seriously about doing a relatively ambitious project which would, I hope, push me to the next level as a poet. I think listening to the panelists discuss the applications will also be a good learning experience, and if I'm lucky, I'll strike up a conversation with one or more of the other Literature applicants, maybe even get a little group to go for coffee or lunch afterwards. That would be nice.

* * * * *

Oh yeah, Napowrimo. Nothing yet today. But I'm on it, I'm on it.

NaPoSnippetMo

Day One:

She was born landlocked,
knows the comfort of maps.

__________

Day Two:

Little factory,
little ghost machine,
your sweet beating. Continue,
please.

napowrimo, day 1

I looked through an L.L. Bean catalog and selected five words and made myself use them in a poem: comfort, essential, balm, twill, wrinkle.

I don't think the poem is a keeper, but at least it's words on the page.

For the most part I probably won't be posting my drafts this month, unless I come up with anything particularly interesting. I may post snippets, or prompts. We'll see.

Tomorrow (er... tonight, I guess) -- a basketball poem, maybe. :)

Is it just me ...?

I was reading a Daedalus Books catalog in the bathroom (some people keep porn in their bathrooms ... I keep book catalogs) and came across this little description in the children's section:

Barbie Birthday Bash
Barbie and her little sisters decide to throw a surprise party for Skipper. They go shopping for roller skates, wrap presents, and decorate a cake, while Ken videotapes the excitement when Skipper arrives.

Roller skates, huh? Oooookay.

* * * * *

Yes, I'm doing NaPoWriMo. No, I haven't written a poem yet today. Yes, I'm about to go into the study, clear off the desk (I've been avoiding the desk lately due to the large pile of unfiled papers, unread books, journals, etc. piled on top of it), and read some poems for a while. Then I will take out a pen and start.

I swear.

* * * * *

This one's for Ms. Loudon: Was Amelia Earhart a doomed castaway? Some pretty persuasive stuff here... wow.

Glück, and a draft

The Louise Glück reading yesterday was quite good, and well-attended. I haven't read Averno yet, but after hearing her read from it I've decided I definitely need to pick it up soon. She read only from Averno, about 40 minutes I guess, then took questions for a little while. Someone asked her what she'd learned from being Poet Laureate, and I guess it wasn't exactly a good experience for her. Heh. Someone else asked her about her work on the Yale Series, and she was much less cranky about that; it sounds like that is work she genuinely enjoys.

Just hearing the work aloud, not having read it yet, was interesting -- I think I hear poems differently when I have not previously encountered them on the page vs. when I have. Something about the poems she read made me think of Carl Phillips' work -- that there was a similar sort of intelligence and thought-to-language process at work. The classical influence, partly, but something more than that. I'll file that in the back of my brain for potential critical-paper-fodder should I ever manage to get myself into an MFA program.

(Edited to add: I almost forgot to mention that she said when she started writing one of the poems in Averno -- I think it was "Landscape" -- it was the first poem she'd written in two years. For some reason I found it comforting to think that she has long dry spells just like the rest of us.)


This draft actually came, in part, from random notes I jotted down during the reading. I think it needs a different title, and I think the language itself needs to be doing more work -- the words here feel too ordinary to me and I want to find words that are more energetic and unusual. The language itself needs to be part of the risk the poem takes. (This is something I need to work on in general.) So this is kind of an outline or a sketch, in a way, as much as a draft. But there's something about it I like enough to keep working on it. To that end, the draft will disappear from this blog in a day or so.



*poof!* draft is gone. thanks to those who commented. :)

Valparaiso Poetry Review and Dangerous Astronomy

Some good stuff in the new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review -- haven't read through it carefully yet, but on first browse, Martha Silano's poem "No Refunds, No Exchanges" really grabbed me, as did featured poet Diane Lockward's "How Is a Shell Like Regret?". There's one of mine in here too: a slightly older poem, kind of a weird one, but one I always thought would eventually find a home somewhere. (And yes, I really did see the picture of the alligator who'd swallowed a man; it was creepy!)

In today's mail: "Dangerous Astronomy," a limited-edition letterpress chapbook by Sherman Alexie, published by Limberlost Press. It's lovely, with a nice typeface and pretty endpapers and heavy, luxurious paper throughout. Its dimensions are somewhat larger than your average chapbook too, so it is really a nice showcase for the poems. I may take this with me to Alexie's reading next month in hopes of getting it signed (my mom's hip surgery has been postponed a couple weeks, so I don't have to miss the reading, yay).

What's new with you?

Amusements

1.
The 2007 Publishing Triangle Award Finalists include these in poetry:

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Robin Becker, The Domain of Perfect Affection (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Kate Lynn Hibbard, Sleeping Upside Down (Silverfish Review Press)
Jennifer Rose, Hometown for an Hour (Ohio University Press)

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Justin Chin, Gutted (Manic D Press)
Jim Elledge, A History of My Tattoo (Stonewall)
Greg Hewett, The Eros Conspiracy (Coffee House Press)

2.
This bit of amusement from Overheard in the Office:

Homeless guy #1: Damn! I just got kicked out of the library! Damn!
Homeless guy #2: What did you do, man?
Homeless guy #1: I don't know. I don't know.
Homeless guy #2: Aren't you drunk?
Homeless guy #1: Well, yeah. Also, I might have been looking at dirty pictures on the computer.
Homeless guy #2: Aw, that's not so bad.
Homeless guy #1: And they said that I was being disrespectful to the librarians.
Homeless guy #2, freaking out: No way, man! You can never, never disrespect the librarians! Always respect librarians! What were you thinking? Are you an idiot?

Outside Boulder Public Library
Boulder, Colorado

Overheard by: Librarian on break

3.
And this for all ye former Englyshe majors, reprinted here by permission of the poet, because it's that time of year:

Spring Break Special
Breast Augmentation, $3,950.00

Spring Break is icumen in
Lhunde sing swimsu
Sliceth knife and passeth coin
And Springeth the breaste nu

--Antonia Matthew
published in Celebrating Seventy, ed. by Jenny Kander (Lexington, KY: Wind, 2003)

4.
Special Bonus Amusement
for anyone within driving distance of Bloomington:

Louise Glück will be reading on Wednesday at 5 pm in the Frangipani Room of the Indiana Memorial Union.

NaPoWriMo, ho ho ho

April's coming! I did the NaPo WriMo thing last year, and although at least 2/3 of what I wrote was pure crap, I wrote at least a couple of poems I doubt I would have written without the discipline of making myself write every day. I don't think I'd want to try to write a poem a day forever, but a month of it is good. See baby-eating monster for details!

* * * * *
I have the biggest stack of books in my to-read pile now. It's not even funny. There are so many of them, and so many that I am extra excited about reading, that I don't even know where to start. People. Stop publishing books for a while, will ya? I need to catch up!

(It's becoming more and more clear to me that while it's important to become disciplined about writing, what I really need to do right now is to get more disciplined about reading. I need to set aside an hour every evening for disappearing into my study with a book. When I'm reading well, writing almost inevitably follows. Maybe I need to have myself a NaPoReadMo! Because I sure do need to read mo'.)

* * * * *
Welcome Carol Guess to the blogosphere! I just stumbled across her blog, Syntax Is A Second Skin, today. I got to know Carol a bit when she was here in Bloomington, studying at IU. Her novels and her "hybrid memoir" are terrific, but I love her poetry the best; Femme's Dictionary, her first collection, is beautiful and dangerous.

* * * * *

I'll be one of the featured readers at the Runcible Spoon's monthly reading tomorrow evening. Last night I rummaged through the past year's output (or so) and came up with what I think is a nice little fifteen-minute set. (I was told "15 to 20" so in the interest of not being one of Those Readers, I'm making it 15.) Tonight I need to practice reading through them a few times, because it feels like I haven't read in a long time. I think I'm going to read something very new and kind of scary-feeling, something that's still very much in process, just to see how it feels coming out of my mouth with people listening. I think that will help me revise the thing. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. Terry Wisniewski is one of the other readers, and she is one of my favorite local poets, so hearing her will be something to look forward to as well.

* * * * *

Found out this week that my mom is having hip replacement surgery next month, so I will most likely be headed up north to help her out for a week or so. Sadly, this means I'll be missing Sherman Alexie's reading here. But with a little luck I'll at least be able to use some of the time productively, and get a bunch of reading done. We've been through this before, or something like it; she had a knee replaced in 2004, and I spent some time doing the caretaker thang then.

In other family news, happy Second Arbitrarily-Assigned Birthday to my orange-and-white cat, Lotus. He was found as a stray (taken to a shelter, then to Rescue Farm, and eventually home with me) so who knows what his real birthday is, but he was about 6 months old when I got him at the end of September, and March 22nd was my dad's birthday and also the birthday of my previous orange-and-white cat Yoda (1986-2004), so it seemed like a felicitous Arbitrary Birthday to select. That's him in my little profile picture up there. He doesn't look a day over Arbitrary Kittenhood.


P.S. Today someone found my blog by googling the phrase "procrastination device." Muahahahahaha. My evil plan is working!

Why they call it CrackThing

Egads, LibraryThing is addictive. I've entered a few hundred books so far -- much of the poetry and writing-related stuff, most of the travel stuff, most of the whale/cetacean/ocean stuff, and now I'm starting in on my general collection (fiction and nonfiction all mashed together, alpha by author) -- in which I am part way through Atwood.

LibraryThing has a lot of nifty little features. One of the cool toys is an "author gallery" -- they don't have pictures of all authors, of course, but you can bring up a little gallery of authors in your collection for whom they have pictures. Here's mine -- see how many you can identify! No cheating; when you hover your mouse over the picture the identification will pop up.

It has nothing to do with poetry or Great Literature, but I'm currently reading a book which is funny as hell and which some of you bloggers out there might enjoy -- Exile in Guyville: How a Punk Rock Redneck Faggot Texan Moved to West Hollywood and Refused to be Shiny and Happy, by Dave White. (That link goes to his website. He's got a blog linked on there, too. Who doesn't have a blog anymore, that's what I want to know.) I guess the book's subtitle pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Seriously, funny as hell.

Spotted my first actual blooming crocuses yesterday (or maybe it was the day before). Which means it will probably snow at least one more time, but spring is officially on the way. Finally.

Multislacking

• Flipping back and forth between tennis (Roddick vs. Ljubicic) and basketball (IU vs. Gonzaga)
• Listening to the cat snore
• Reading blogs and other things online
  
• Tinkering with a new poem, just a bit (the poem is scaring me, just a bit -- which is a good thing)
  
• Contemplating a late night snack
• Breathing slowly and calmly
• Hoping, always, for the best
• Making lunch plans with friends for tomorrow (the China Star in Ellettsville is calling my name... mmm!)
• Typing out this silly blog post
• Wiggling my toes
• Listening to the song that's stuck inside my head
• Trying to remember to count my blessings
• Nothin' but net, baby. Nothin' but net.

Drafty in here

This is rough, and it won't stay up long.


[And, gone. If you missed it and want to see it, email me...]

LibraryThing top twenty

On LibraryThing, users can choose to tag their books -- by subject, theme, genre, format, location, or whatever -- or not. Of those users who chose to tag books as "poetry," these are the top twenty books (sitewide) tagged as poetry (or variants thereof, like "poems" or "poesia"), and the number of users who tagged them as such:

1. Leaves of grass (725)
2. The Odyssey (663)
3. The inferno (627)
4. Beowulf : a new verse translation (612)
5. The Iliad (586)
6. The divine comedy (529)
7. Where the sidewalk ends : the poems & drawings of Shel Silve… (455)
8. The Canterbury tales (453)
9. The complete works by William Shakespeare (446)
10. The waste land and other poems (429)
11. Old Possum's book of practical cats (395)
12. The poetry of Robert Frost (394)
13. Ariel (393)
14. The sonnets by William Shakespeare (377)
15. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (377)
16. A light in the attic (363)
17. The Aeneid (358)
18. Paradise lost : an authoritative text, backgrounds and sourc… (343)
19. Howl, and other poems (323)
20. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson (300)

Note that LibraryThing combines multiple editions of a book under one title, so -- for example -- the numbers for Ariel include both the original and the new "revised" edition, and there are probably a ton of different editions of the Shakespeare sonnets. Still, it's kind of interesting, huh?

Also interesting: the top 10,000 works tagged as poetry in LibraryThing. (The list may take a few seconds to load.)

And of the books I've added to my LibraryThing library so far, here are the top ten most popular (by number of appearances in other LT users' libraries) -- note this does not depend on tags, just titles, so the numbers are considerably larger than those in the poetry-tagged list:

1. The complete works of Shakespeare (3719)
   
2. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (926)
   
3. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (883)
   
4. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot (836)
   
5. The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath (685)
   
6. 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings (446)
   
7. The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams (336)
   
8. A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (330)
   
9. The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath (193)
   
10. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 by Adrienne Rich (152)
    

As for my own library, I've got the bulk of my already-read poetry entered -- single authors only, not anthologies -- 268 books. Haven't touched anything but poetry yet. It's been fun to go through the shelves and actually lay hands on each book, thinking about when and where I acquired it. There are a few items I'd forgotten that I owned, like a tiny little locally-published limited-edition chapbook by Yusef Komunyakaa called February in Sydney. And I took a moment or two with each of the signed books, especially those that were signed for me by teachers (mostly in summer workshops), thinking about those interactions & what they meant to me.

I'm looking forward to entering the rest of my books, although it will probably take me ... years.

Ain't no thang

So, I finally got sucked into the world of LibraryThing. For the uninitiated, this is an incredibly cool site where you can catalog your own books -- you can put in the title, author, ISBN, or whatever and it will search Amazon and the Library of Congress catalog & retrieve the full bibliographic data. Or, if you have a fairly obscure item, you can enter everything manually. Then the fun begins. You can tag your books, so that you can retrieve all the ones tagged "autographed" or "stolen from my ex" or "translations" or "Yale younger poet winners" or whatever floats your boat. You can see how many other LibraryThingers own the same titles. You can get recommendations based on what other people who own a particular title also own. You can post reviews, join groups to discuss various bookish topics, and on and on and on. Oh yes, you can also access the site on a mobile browser, so if you're in the bookstore and you can't remember whether you already own something or not, you can look it up. How cool is that?

It's free to catalog up to 200 books; for unlimited use, you can pay $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership -- which I will probably end up doing. I've started by just putting in a) poetry books, b) which I own, and c) which I have already read. I do read a lot of library books as well, and maybe once I get my whole library entered I'll start adding those. But I own a crapload of books, so it's going to be quite a while before I get all of my own up there. I may actually get all the poetry done before summer, though. :D

Also, you can make a widget to show random books from your library in the sidebar of your blog. So looky! -- mine's over there --------->.

Recreational cataloging. Who woulda thunk it? (For the record, although I did OK in the cataloging class when I was in library school, I came away from it thinking "I am so not a cataloger." Hah!)

(If you are a fellow LibraryThinger, feel free to drop a comment on my library over there!)

Quincy Troupe & Billy Bang

So tonight I went to hear Quincy Troupe along with jazz violinist Billy Bang. It was AMAZING. Billy Bang is just an incredible musician (he's played with Sun Ra and all kinds of other heavyweights) -- when he started playing tears came to my eyes, and OK that happens a lot when I listen to excellent jazz (partly because my father was a jazz musician so I grew up with the stuff plus it reminds me of him), but I wasn't really expecting to have that sort of reaction tonight. He played stuff that made me giggle, and stuff that made me cry, and stuff that just made my jaw drop with its sheer virtuosity. He made a violin sound swear to god just like Jimi Hendrix on guitar, besides channeling Miles and Duke and his own inimitable self. I think I have blisters on my fingers just from watching him. I bought two of his CDs (and got them signed), and can't wait to give them a listen.

And Quincy Troupe -- well, a lot of you reading this have probably heard him before, so you know he is practically a musician himself with his words, and to see/hear him trading riffs with Billy Bang was just insanely hot. I think the highlight for me was "The Architecture of Language," title poem from his 2006 collection (which I bought and got him to sign), which was just a tour de force of language & music & emotion. Also "Vichyssoise," which was just plain fun, and his poem about Magic Johnson, and a long one set in Spain (which he read solo). You could tell he was loving the music and having a good time, too.

The scary thing? They hadn't really performed together before. But of course that's what jazz musicians do, they sit in, they improvise, they create a conversation that's never happened before and will never happen again. They do apparently have plans to work together more, so watch out for them, because if you get a chance to hear them, YOU MUST GO.

So if anyone sees Cathy Bowman (organizer of this particular poetry series) at AWP, let her know that Quincy and Billy rocked the house.


everything is changing everywhere poetry grows
word by word, sound by sound, form by form, cadence by cadence,
mack by mack, word plays sluicing under the syllables
stitching evolving language into innovative soundtracks,
found in the very air we breathe every day

everywhere, everything is changing

[from "The Architecture of Language"]

In like a lion, out like a Lammy

I hope everyone who's had to face ferocious weather today is OK. I guess it's officially spring ... I was awakened last night about 3:30 AM by window-rattling, bone-rattling thunder. I was in a tornado (as in, it mashed up the house we lived in) when I was five, in Kansas, so I've always been acutely aware of severe weather whenever it rolls through. Weather also shows up in my poems a lot, and it's usually not a metaphor -- weather is just that important to us tornado-alley residents.

Anyway, I see there is still a tornado watch out for most of Georgia, until 5 am. Stay safe, all you crazy AWP-ers.

* * * * *

Tomorrow night Quincy Troupe is reading here in town, along with jazz violinist Billy Bang. A bit odd that the MFA program is bringing in a major reading during AWP, but no matter -- I'm looking forward to it.

* * * * *

Breaking news! This literally landed in my inbox this very moment as I was typing up this post. Here are this year's Lambda Literary Award finalists in poetry:

Nominees for LESBIAN POETRY

Domain of Perfect Affection by Robin Becker (University of Pittsburgh)
Days of Good Looks by Cheryl Clarke (Carroll & Graf)
The Truant Lover by Juliet Patterson (Nightboat Books)
Lemon Hound by Sina Queyras (Coach House Books)
Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens (Coach House Books)

Nominees for GAY POETRY

Gutted by Justin Chin (Manic D Press)
The Album That Changed My Life by Jeffrey Conway (Cold Calm Press)
A History of My Tattoo by Jim Elledge (Stonewall)
Other Fugitives & Other Strangers by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Tupelo Press)
When the Eye Forms by Dwaine Rieves (Tupelo)

______________
Yes, I am overly pleased with myself for the terrible, terrible pun in the title of this blog post. Stop snickering. Honestly, the post was already titled "In like a lion" before the Lammy finalists hit my inbox, so how could I resist??? But I agree, I should be shot for that one.

Bollingen to Bidart

I haven't seen this posted too many places yet, but Frank Bidart has been awarded this year's Bollingen Prize. $100,000 ... not too shabby.

Here's the press release from Yale.

And here's another article about it.

Oscars, linkage, and a poem

I enjoyed watching the Oscars even though I don't think I've seen any of the movies this year. I absolutely love that everyone is going on about Helen Mirren being sexy, because a) she IS and b) it's just nice to hear that about a woman who actually isn't trying to look like she is still twenty-four. Loved Jada Pinkett Smith's dress. Totally agree with whichever online article I read this morning that said Cameron Diaz looked like she was wearing a giant business envelope. SASE, anyone? Ellen: Great hair, but something around the eye makeup looked weird. Got a kick out of seeing Melissa Etheridge winning herself a little gold dude (I heard that backstage she said Oscar would be the only naked man allowed in her bedroom!) and how much Tammy was beaming from her seat as Melissa made her thank-yous. I'd put the DVR on pause while I went downstairs to futz with laundry, so when Celine Dion came on I was able to fast-forward right on past her. DVRs rule.

* * * * *

Linkage:

Meetings make us dumber, study shows (I knew it!)

An Estimate of the Number of Shakespeare's Atoms in a Living Human Being (I don't understand any of this math, but it's awesome anyway)

* * * * *

I ordered this book, and when it came I opened directly to this poem. I keep coming back to it and reading it again instead of starting in on the rest of the book (though I'll do that soon). Enjoy:

The Story Attaches Itself to Us

like the seed of some plant. Its small hooks catch
the cuff of our thought as it walks across
a field. We may not see it or notice
that we are telling some part of it
in telling another story. The story
of Jonah is never about the whale,
who must have been startled one day
to find a two-legged fish in its belly.
So it is, Anangagjuak, you told how
you came upon the body of your wife
lying with her arms reached out, whether
toward you or the life that, though it slowed down,
could no longer wait for her, is not known.
She died looking for you in a storm
as you were hunting, and the snow
buried and preserved her for the day
when you and the others would again
be hunting, when like a dying walrus,
a noise would rise out of your body
at the sight of her on the ground, a noise
you did not know could live there. So I tell
the story of what lives secretly inside us
or comes to be there for no known reason,
and waits only for the day when we
open our mouths in its presence,
and out it comes, alive and chastened,
returned miraculously to the world,
while we turn flukes upward and dive.

--Roger Mitchell
from Half/Mask (University of Akron Press, 2007)

Say This of Horses

Coming in April from the University of Iowa Press-- Say This of Horses: A Selection of Poems, edited by C.E. Greer and Jenny Kander. (Click the book cover for UIowa's catalog listing.) (whoops, sorry ... link should be fixed now)

The editors are both here in Bloomington, and they're also working on an anthology of Indiana poets which includes a little something of my own (I guess that counts as "bias disclosure"). This anthology features an introduction by Maxine Kumin, and includes poems by Merwin, Komunyakaa, Stevens, Kenyon, Ferlinghetti, Harjo, Rilke, Williams, Larkin, and others. It looks pretty interesting, and I look forward to getting a copy for myself.

In fact, tonight I attended a reading by the Bloomington Free Verse Poets, a group which includes both Charles and Jenny (aforementioned editors). It was sparsely attended, mainly because the sky was busy dumping buckets of freezing slush on Bloomington -- it was really pretty disgusting out there, and I almost decided to stay home myself -- but a nice, low-key reading, with good conversation and delicious goodies afterwards.

It looks like there's disgusting weather all over the country tonight. We've had rain, snow, sleet, slush, thunder, ice, and wind -- but we've had it better than a whole lot of places. Hope everyone reading this is warm and dry!

Things to look forward to

Today I made it official -- I am taking three days of vacation time during our spring break, which starts in two weeks. No plans for it other than to hang out at home, annoy the cats, read books, go sit in a coffeehouse or two and overcaffeinate & write, etc.

Also, I got my printed summer-workshop catalog from the Fine Arts Work Center in the mail the other day. Lots of nice pictures that make me say "ahhhhh, Provincetown." Summer isn't really that far away, right?

Also, on March 23rd I will be one of the featured readers at the monthly Runcible Spoon Poetry Series. I think I already mentioned that here, but it's on my mind because this evening I went to the February reading. It was pretty low-key, and a nice evening; plus I got dinner there, a delicious chicken/pasta/vegetable dish that thoroughly filled the plate, and then thoroughly filled me. Lots of times I feel too tired and couch-potatoey to go out on a Friday evening after a long work week, but I'm glad I managed it tonight.

Tomorrow I'll have lunch with a couple of non-poety friends, and then in the evening the Bloomington Free Verse Poets, a group which includes some friends of mine, are doing their annual reading at Boxcar Books (the first time they've used that venue). So that should be fun.

Got a couple of books in the mail today, and a phone message that another one I special ordered is available to be picked up at Howard's Bookstore downtown. I really need to make an effort to set aside more time for reading. There are so many wonderful books in the world. And I want to read all of them, you hear me? Every last one.

I'll just have to become immortal or something.

* * * * *

Also: We love you, George Takei.

The thaw

Yesterday, five days after the storm, there was still ice in the trees. It looked like tinsel in the sun.

Today the temperature soared to 47 and there's slush everywhere. Runoff from the melt is dripping into my basement and setting off the sump pump. Oh, the joys of homeownership.

* * * * *

There is a decided absence of poetry in my life these days. I need to muster up some determination and stop farting around. If nothing else I could at least send out some stuff -- I only have poems out two places now, and chapbook manuscripts out to three contests. Submitting stuff isn't the same as mucking around with poetry, but at least it's a little closer to the right ballpark. If writing poetry is the ballpark, sending stuff out is the concession stand at the ballpark.

No hot dog jokes please. (Yes, I'm talking to you.)

* * * * *

Fresh: Blood Orange Review.

* * * * *

IU's MFA program finally posted the spring semester reading schedule on their website. Still to come this semester: Quincy Troupe, David Lehman, and Sherman Alexie. I am beyond excited to hear Sherman Alexie. I like his work a whole heck of a lot.

Lehman is reading one night, then doing some sort of a "Tour of American Poetry" a couple nights later. Unfortunately I will have to miss that, as I'm on the roster to read at the Runcible Spoon for their monthly reading series that same night. That's the end of March, so hopefully it will kick me into gear a bit to tackle NaPoWriMo again in April. Yep, I'm going to do that again this year: a poem a day. It was good for me last year, for sure.

Hard to envision, from this bleak and slushy landscape, enough creative fertility to come up with a poem (even a sucky poem) every day. But I will make it happen. Dammit.

* * * * *

Drip, drip, drip. Drip.

iced

iced
Originally uploaded by vitreous_fish.

This is what ALL the trees here look like now. The world has never been quite so sparkly!

Glamor shots

Attention Rebecca Loudon, Charles Jensen, and Ivy Alvarez: y'all are reviewed (by yours truly) in the new issue of Galatea Resurrects. (Yes, it sounds familiar -- it's a revision of a post from this blog. My thanks to Eileen Tabios for suggesting that I send it in!)

* * * * *

So we had a bit of an ice storm here yesterday. I wimped out and left work early, before the streets got bad; some 6000 households locally were without power thanks to ice on power lines, ice on branches making them fall onto power lines, etc. but fortunately I wasn't among them. Woke up this morning to hear on the radio that campus was closed until noon, which was pretty astonishing; snow days are all but unheard-of here. (Okay, it wasn't really a snow day -- we only got about two inches of that -- more of an ice day.) It was beyond lovely to look outside at the sun rising over a frozen world, and to turn right around and go back to my nice warm cozy bed for a couple hours.

Also beyond lovely: the frozen world today. Driving near campus, the brilliant sun made diamonds of ice -- made the trees into crystal sculptures, into ghosts. The power lines encased in ice looked like blue laser beams. Just breathlessly, frighteningly beautiful.

* * * * *

Hooray for James, the English Springer Spaniel who won Best in Show at Westminster! Even though I had to work till 9 pm on Monday, I recorded the first night's competition and started watching when I got home. So, yes, I watched all six hours that were televised. Riveted to the TV, I was. Westminster is my Super Bowl, my Oscar Night, and my American Idol all rolled into one. I have to say I was rooting for the PBGV -- that's Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen (and you wonder why they call it "a Peeb" for short!) -- for BiS, cute little critter that she was, but all along I did think the Springer had an awfully good chance. He was just showing beautifully, and what a gorgeous dog.

Lots of gorgeous dogs, really. The cats always get just a little nervous when I watch Westminster because I go into total "wanna doggie!" mode. I do want a dog, but as it stands right now the poor thing would be crated from 7:45 am until, most days, close to 6 pm. And that just wouldn't be right. Someday, though, someday.

* * * * *

Today I left work early and went to a photo shoot. The April issue of Bloom: Celebrating Life in Bloomington (not to be confused with the other Bloom) features an article on the history of the poetry scene here in Bloomington, and yours truly is one of the featured poets, along with Cathy Bowman, Roger Mitchell (who has a new book out), Tony Brewer, Jenny Kander, and Patricia Coleman. The issue will include interviews with each of us and a selection of our poems, in addition to the (glamorous, I'm sure) photos. For the group shot we had to stand OUTSIDE. And since it's for an April magazine we couldn't bundle up in our heavy winter coats. The horror! (Actually, it was bright and sunny and not really that cold, though certainly below freezing.)

Those of you who know Bloomington will appreciate the complete and total appropriateness of the fact that the photo shoot took place at the Runcible Spoon. *grin*

It was a pleasant couple of hours, and it's fun to be in such stellar company -- two of the poets (Roger and Cathy) have been my teachers, and the others (including Shana Ritter, who wrote the article) are friends of mine. I'll try to snag some extra copies of the magazine when it comes out, in case anyone might be interested in getting one.

* * * * *

No AWP for me this year, unfortunately, unless someone drops some unexpected cash in my lap. Maybe next year. All y'all who are going, have a drink (or not) for me!

* * * * *

Happy Half-Price Valentine Candy Day, tomorrow. Now that's a holiday I can get behind. And if I eat a lot of the stuff, I'll have even more behind to get.

Thankyew, I'll be here all night. Be sure and tip your waitress.

Riches, embarrassment of

Lots of great new music coming out this spring. Aaron gives a heads-up about a new one from Mary Chapin Carpenter to be released soon; I got a coupon in my email from a certain mega-book-and-music-chain reminding me that I want to go buy Patty Griffin's new one; and also in my email today, pre-order information for Joyful Sign, coming soon from Girlyman. And when I went to a certain other mega-chain's website to check on the release date for some of the above, it helpfully informed me that the documentary about the Dixie Chicks, Shut Up and Sing, is coming out on DVD in a couple of weeks -- which is great news for me because I don't think it ever played here in town. Heck, I wasn't even tired of the last new CD I bought (Amy Ray and the Volunteers: Live in Knoxville -- great, raw, rockin', very live folkish-punkish stuff) yet.

I don't know how I'm going to find time to listen to, watch, and read all the stuff I want to listen to, watch, and read. Dang. On the good side, should I ever accidentally win the lottery or something and retire to a life of leisure, I don't have to worry about ever getting bored.

* * * * *

Ginger has a nice offer of blog space for poet-bloggers who don't like the new version of Blogger.

* * * * *

Today at work I was in a meeting of one committee in which we were discussing a document that had been written by a subteam of that committee. One of the questions afoot (at hand? well, it was somewhere anatomical, anyway) was whether the document was clear and conveyed what we wanted it to convey to our intended audience. My contribution to the discussion was to point out that maybe those who had written the document & had had our noses buried in it for a few weeks probably shouldn't steer the discussion by explaining what we meant in it -- that we should listen and find out what our readers understood from what was on the page, since we knew what we meant but who knows if what we meant made it to the page. You know ... your basic Creative Writing Workshop 101. Nice to think I learned something from poetry that can be put to use in a more, er, financially remunerative environment.

* * * * *

Can winter be over, already? Enough! I'm tired of being cold.

* * * * *

So I had m-w.com open in one browser tab to make sure I was spelling "remunerative" correctly, and I had Aaron's blog open in the next browser tab to grab the link to his Mary Chapin Carpenter post. When I went back to that browser, I realized that the page titles in those two tabs were, uh, the story of my life:

| Definition of remunerative || anything but poetry |

Ha!!

Lambda nominees

Lambda Literary Award nominations are out. Here are the nominees in poetry:

Nominees for LESBIAN POETRY (16)

• Inch Aeons by Nuala Archer (Les Figues Press)
• Collected Poems by Djuna Barnes (University of Wisconsin)
• Domain of Perfect Affection by Robin Becker (University of Pittsburgh)
• Days of Good Looks by Cheryl Clarke (Carroll & Graf)
• Like All We Love by Kate Evans (The Q Press)
• The Butterfly Effect by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex Press)
• Sleeping Upside Down by Kate Lynn Hibbard (Silverfish Review Press
• Thirst by Mary Oliver (Beacon)
• The Truant Lover by Juliet Patterson (Nightboat Books)
• Lemon Hound by Sina Queyras (Coach House Books)
• First Person by Red Summer (Two Fingers Press)
• Not Just a Personal Ad by Vittoria Repetto (Guernica Editons)
• Hopeless Insomniac by Laura Riehman (Laura Riehman)
• Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens (Coach House Books)
• What I Want From You edited by Linda Zeiser & Trena Machado (Raw Art Press)
• Emergency Contact by Tara-Michele Ziniuk (McGillian Books)

Nominees for GAY POETRY (14)

• But So Did Her Brother! by Brian Kevin Beck (Wonderside Productions)
• Gutted by Justin Chin (Manic D Press)
• Deviant Propulsion by CA Conrad (Soft Skull Press)
• The Album That Changed My Life by Jeffrey Conway (Cold Calm Press)
• A History of My Tattoo by Jim Elledge (Stonewall)
• The Burning of Troy by Richard Foerster (BOA)
• Other Fugitives & Other Strangers by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Tupelo Press)
• Sweet Son of Pan by Trebor Healey (Suspect Thoughts)
• The Eros Conspiracy by Greg Hewett (Coffee House Press)
• The Damaged Good by G. Winston James (Vintage Entity Press)
• On the Tongue by Jeff Mann (Gival Press)
• Riding Westward by Carl Philips (FSG)
• When the Eye Forms by Dwaine Rieves (Tupelo)
• Mirrors for Gold by Roberto Tejada (Krupskaya)

For nominations in the other categories, see the Lambda Foundation website.

* * * * *

Word of the week: Whalefall.

* * * * *

6 inches of snow and 19 degrees outside (considerably warmer than it was last night). I've managed to come down with a cold or flu or something, so I'll just be here shivering in my blankets for a while...

Reunion

Back from a whirlwind trip for my great-aunt's burial. I spent time with family members I had not seen in literally 20-30 years. All in all, it was good and I'm very glad I went.

Also realized there are poems in Kansas that I may need to go back and find at some point. The hawks in the trees, that bleak brown landscape. Have you ever traveled someplace just to look for poems?

Funny how a place can be all about the past, and memories, for me -- and yet there are people who live there now & have been living there all along. How time loops back on itself, sometimes.

Looking around at relatives I haven't seen forever -- how there is still such kinship. The context of it all. Oh, that's who I am. I'd forgotten.

Also: Topeka is larger than I remembered; Osage City, on the other hand, even smaller than I remembered.

Sometime, I'll go back again just to look for poems.

Away for a bit

A sad farewell to Molly Ivins. Damn. I liked her a lot.

* * * * *
I'll be offline from late Thursday night or early Friday morning until sometime Sunday -- going to my great-aunt's memorial service in a very small middle-of-nowhere town in Kansas.

* * * * *

Go Colts!

Oink

"I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork." --Jim Harrison, in the New York Times

* * * * *

I said I'd do it, and I did. Two big "get this out before the deadline" pushes went into the mail today. I deserve chocolate.

* * * * *

Summer planning season is upon us, at least for us workshop-aholics (ahem, no comment intended on my own social proclivities when in my favorite queer resort town)! The Fine Arts Work Center in lovely Provincetown has posted their schedule of summer workshops, and of course there are at least six I would love to take. Oh winning lottery ticket, wherefore art thou? Seriously, if you're looking for a glorious summer workshop, this is the best program I have found. Not cheap. Definitely not cheap. But if you can swing it, it's pretty splendid.

The Indiana University Writers' Conference here in Bloomington posted their 2007 information today as well. This summer's faculty: Heather McHugh, Khaled Mattawa, Lee Martin, Matthew Klam, Adam Langer, Nicholas Dawidoff, Catherine Bowman, and Crystal Wilkinson. I'll try to make at least some of the evening readings, though I won't be "conferencing" here this time around.

* * * * *

In today's mail: Collin Kelley's chapbook, Slow To Burn. I gave it a quick read over dinner at Qdoba, before going back to work for my 6-9 pm shift on the reference desk. It made me think about how, in a way, each of our lives is made up of all the people we've known over the years. If each person who has mattered to us is a speck on the map, connecting those dots gives you a self-portrait of sorts. I'll go back and give these poems a more careful read later. It's a beautifully printed little chapbook, too.

* * * * *

Sad news today about Barbaro. For a while there, I really thought he'd make it. Farewell, brave beautiful animal.

Apropos of nothing

Quote of the Day
Tennis hottie Rafael Nadal: "I have pain here, in my famous ass."

* * * * *

Scientists can't get sloth to move. (Sounds like the Onion, but it's for real!)

* * * * *

I have way too many books in this house, and way too little money in my bank account. Does anyone here have experience, good or bad, with selling books online? Care to share? I know people who've sold books via amazon, half.com, etc. with mixed experiences. I'll probably try selling some of them locally first, just on principle.

* * * * *

I feel much more like the immovable sloth than like Rafa Nadal, that's for sure.

ALA Notable Books

The American Library Association has released its annual list of 25 "Notable Books for Adults." Named in poetry were:

Flenniken, Kathleen, Famous, Univ of Nebraska Pr, $17.95.
Satterlee, Thom, Burning Wyclif, Texas Tech Univ Pr.
Slavitt, David R., William Henry Harrison and Other Poems. LSU Pr, $16.95.

Alison Bechdel's amazing "graphic memoir," Fun Home, was included in the nonfiction list, as well as being given the Stonewall Award from ALA's GLBT Round Table. Go Alison!

Starry starry blog

For some reason I've gotten just a whole ton of blog visitors coming in directly to the post previous to this one, though Sitemeter isn't showing me any search terms for these visits -- like the post has been making the rounds of email or something. It's not exactly the most interesting post I have ever made or anything. It is a puzzlement.

* * * * *

The Poetry Foundation is looking for an Associate Editor.

And Three Candles Press is looking for book-length manuscripts by women.

* * * * *

I finally moved to the new version of Blogger. Like anybody cares.

* * * * *

The new issue of Pleiades arrived today and it looks to be just chock-full of good stuff.

What's a "chock" anyway?

* * * * *

In the past ten days I've actually done far more revising than first-drafting. This is new for me, and incredibly welcome (and incredibly needed). I only wish I were better with titles.

Sometimes when I'm stuck on a poem I'll go to Wikipedia and look up something related to the general topic or major image/metaphor in the poem, whether that is radio astronomy, transgender issues, navigation at sea, or the visible spectrum. Or I'll go to the Encyclopedia Britannica online, or just to Google (either Google Scholar or plain vanilla Google). I'm not necessarily looking for information per se; what I usually want to do is to steal some language (and to learn enough about the specialized vocabulary to be sure I'm not using that language incorrectly). It's fun and often helpful. It can also chew up a whole lot of time and turn into the most amazing procrastination device.

* * * * *

I like asterisks.

* * * * *

Note to self: the week one has to finalize a grant application is not the best time to have a crisis of confidence in one's work. Just sayin'.

NBCC nominations and a good day

Hot off the press, thanks to the wom-po list, here are this year's National Book Critics Circle Award nominations in poetry:

Eighty-one year-old W.D. Snodgrass, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, was a poetry finalist for Not for Specialists. Fellow nominees included Daisy Fried's My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga, the late Miltos Sachtouris' Poems 1945-1971 and Troy Jollimore's Tom Thomson in Purgatory.

* * * * *

A good day today: brunch at the Runcible Spoon (including their famous pancake the size of Julie Dill's head) with a friend, and poetry talk; lots of sunshine before tomorrow's predicted heavy (for these parts) snow; time spent in a comfy chair beside a window in the public library; puttering about with a chapbook manuscript, tweaking poems and writing a new one specifically for this sequence; getting ready to work on some submissions; snoring cats and good books all around me. There is much, always, to look forward to.

Weather, under the

New to the blogosphere: Edward Byrne, editor of the Valparaiso Poetry Review, has a new blog focusing on book reviews. Check out One Poet's Notes.

* * * * *

Got the new issue of Prairie Schooner today. Nice to see three poems by Kelli Russell Agodon there! I hope to dig into the rest of this issue soon. It's frightening how fast the journals and books pile up -- and I keep bringing home stuff from the library (someone really needs to take away the interlibrary loan crack pipe ... being able to get my hands on practically any book that exists, for free, delivered to my place of work, is just too damned addictive; nevermind that the huge library where I work already owns practically any book I can think of). I'll never catch up, will I? No, I never will.

* * * * *

"Under the weather" is a funny idiom, isn't it? A little googling suggests that it comes from the notion that bad weather can make one ill, and/or from the nautical phrase under the weather bow, i.e. on the side of the ship that gets the worst of a rough sea, thus suggesting seasickness. In any event, I'm not seasick here in landlocked Indiana, but I've been just a tad bit under the weather for a couple days. Back soon full strength, though, I'm sure.

Trickery

Fresh: WOMB, Boxcar Poetry Review.

* * * * *

Today: tennis, rain, more tennis, more rain, going in to work for three hours (it's a holiday, but we were still providing reference services and I was scheduled on the desk), snow, more tennis.

Also caffeine, and good progress on a grant application.

* * * * *

Ran across a note I'd written about a then-new poem, back in October 2004:

Scribbled out a poem at lunch today. In a few minutes I'll type it up and see if it's any good. Might not be, but you never know. I've been reading the Warren Wilson craft anthology, Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, and oddly enough reading this kind of critical essay sometimes gets me writing. (Which is yet another thing that makes me think I should run off and get an MFA, but whatever.) Anyway I was reading an essay by Marianne Boruch about bee imagery in Plath's poems, and the title "Opening the Hive" struck me for a poem about open-heart surgery. The poem may have gone downhill from there, though. Heh. Anyway, that's three poems in five days -- one Saturday, one Sunday, and one today -- and that makes me happy, even if they're not great.

Which makes me think a couple of things. One, I sure as heck don't always know whether a poem's any good or not until it's had a while to age; this poem ended up in a nice place, so apparently someone thought it was decent (after some revision, of course). Two, I find it interesting to go back and remember where poems came from; perhaps I'll make more of an effort to document this as I go along.

In fact, I think it would be kind of fun to make a practice of keeping "notes on inspiration" in my poetry notebook along with the rough drafts. Or perhaps even make it a separate notebook or journal. Hmmm. Revisiting the original impulse could be helpful (or not...) in revision; also, I think it's good to know what kind of things tend to spark you into writing, so you can make an effort to do those things when you need to get yourself going. I absolutely don't believe in sitting around waiting for inspiration. If caffeine and craft essays trick your particular Muse into dancing, or if it requires putting on the lucky socks, then make time for those things.

Yes, I'm narcissistically fascinated with my own creative process, and we all know what that's called. But I'm fascinated with yours, too. How can you trick your particular Muse? What do you do when you want to put yourself in that writing frame of mind? Do you pour yourself a glass of wine? Burn that "Inspiration" scented aromatherapy candle you found on clearance at Target? Put on some music? Go for a walk? Hire a hundred monkeys and sit them down at a hundred typewriters and hope like hell for Shakespeare? Tell me.

rainy night house

Welcome another terrific (yes I know that word is overused, shut up) poet to the blogosphere: Megan O'Reilly. Hi, Megan!

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Tennis season is back -- the Australian Open began this evening. Yay! I love watching tennis, and it's also nice that if a match isn't especially compelling, the repetitive sound of it fades easily into the background, so I can get some reading or writing or editing or mindless net-surfing accomplished. I'm pulling for James Blake on the men's side; I really think this will be his year to land a Grand Slam trophy. On the women's side, I'd love to see Martina Hingis do well, though I doubt she has a shot at the title -- but you never know.

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Caffeine is my friend. Today I proved, once again, that if I just hit the right caffeination level, I will be productive almost despite myself. I've got a slightly-revised chapbook manuscript ready to go out to one contest, and a brand-new (well, newly-cobbled-together) chapbook manuscript almost ready to go out to another contest. The new one has two or three poems in common with the old one, but no more than that, and feels very different to me. It needs a title, though. I also made minor, but in some cases important, revisions to a nice stack of poems.

I don't think I particularly believe in the Muse, but coffee is definitely the Nectar of the Muse, for me.

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I've been reading Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, which is just hysterically funny. If you're looking for a book that will make you gigglesnort in a most unladylike fashion in public places, and you're not easily offended by extreme irreverence (though without any disrespect) towards people and events from the Bible, I highly recommend this one.

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Rain here. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. But at least it isn't ice. Those of you in Missouri, Illinois, etc. -- I hope you are doing OK. Stay safe!

My glamorous job*

The trouble with working in a humongous library is that when you finish your lunch, and you still have time left on your lunch hour, you go up to the stacks (the 10th floor, where they hide the PR and PS call numbers) and by the time you get back in the elevator ten minutes later you have this ginormous stack of books you're never going to be able to finish in the 4 months before they're due. (Mainly because of the three other ginormous stacks of books you already checked out and brought home before.)

Me? Addicted to books? No, I could quit anytime I wanted to. Really. I swear on a ginormous stack of books.
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*title of post shamelessly ganked from the fabulous Radish King

Transitions; or, why I've been in a rut maybe?

This is the thought that's currently both exciting and terrifying me:
The work you've been doing for the past few years is done. It's time to move on to something new. Wrap up the old work, tie its shoelaces, pat it on the head and send it off to go wherever it goes. You have to clear the decks before anything new has room to land.

The terrifying part, of course, being -- having faith that there will be "anything new." Not to mention, faith that the old work won't get flattened by a runaway school bus the minute it turns the corner and I can't keep an eye on it anymore.

Sometimes it's easier to start things than to finish them, eh?

The Muse (if she exists) whispers seductively. She taps her foot impatiently. She shakes her shaggy head and says, Look, if I've told you once I've told you a hundred times. She turns her back but when she doesn't know you're looking you see her cast a furtive eye over her shoulder to make sure you are still following. She is bread crumbs in the forest, the fairy tale that takes a wrong turn. She is blue, she is that minor key, she is laughing at you. Amphibious, she tries to lead you into water, launching herself toward the blurred horizon. Land mammal that you are, you wade in chest deep, stand stock still, feet mired in the muck of the bottom. Your thick brown fur is soaked and briny. There's a great wave coming. Learn to swim. Learn to swim. Learn to swim.

Pebble Lake Review; deadlines

My poems "After the Crash" and "The Last Storm" are in the new issue of Pebble Lake Review -- and also up on their website, complete with audio (click on the little megaphone icons). Yes, I have that flat Midwestern accent. (I was also at the tail end of a nasty cold; not sure if you can tell that from my voice or not.)

There are a ton of other terrific poets in this issue as well, including Shanna Compton, Suzanne Frischkorn, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Christine Hamm, Ron Mohring, Steve Schroeder, and others. I am tickled to see my poems hanging out with the cool kids! :) Keep that New Year's resolution about supporting poetry, and buy yourself a copy (or subscribe)...

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After missing one too many submission deadlines, I've started keeping a spreadsheet of projects and deadlines (as well as projects without deadlines, like poems or manuscripts I really want to revise in the near future). I hope it helps. I've also thought about using the Google Calendar, but I haven't really dinked around with that yet, and a spreadsheet was the quick & dirty way of getting something started. Those of you who send stuff out a lot, do you have any method of tracking upcoming deadlines? Does it help?

Miscellaneous and sundry

Sad to hear that Tillie Olsen has died at the highly respectable age of 94. Tell Me a Riddle, her first book, came out the year I was born. She was an important writer for me in my undergrad years, particularly as I began to understand how (for me) feminism influenced and informed the writing and reading of literature.

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I'm not a football fan, but I have to say the last quarter of the Fiesta Bowl the other night was some pretty exciting stuff. I mean, I don't understand the rules of the game and half the time I can't even figure out who's got the ball, and there were a couple of plays that had even me yelling "that was amazing!" Go, Boise State!

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Brent Goodman asks a good question about line breaks over on his blog. I'm afraid I kind of rambled on a bit, but this is something I've been thinking about over the past year or two; I think my lines (and the breaks thereof) have changed somewhat over time, as my thinking about them has changed. I used to focus on the last word of a line and try to figure out if that was a good word to break on; now I tend to look at the line as an organic whole, rather than focusing on the break. But it's still something I wrestle with. I think the question of what makes a line a line (and why do you break it where you do) is integral to understanding what makes poetry different from prose, so it's an important thing to think about.

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Today I received early-registration info for summer workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center. As usual, my first reaction is holy crap, there are a lot of amazing teachers I'd love to work with. (Maxine Kumin, for one!) The prices have gone up since last year, which I guess shouldn't be surprising but given my dinky-ass budget is unfortunate. They've restructured things a bit, too: there are now 15-hour (3 hours a day) and 20-hour (4 hours a day) workshops, with the 20-hour ones costing a bit more; and you don't get a 15-minute individual meeting with your instructor anymore, but you can elect to pay an extra $150 for a half-hour manuscript consultation (which does mean you can get feedback on more poems than you'd be able to bring in to class during the week -- and, it would be possible to get that consultation with someone else who's teaching that week depending on demand, so if you're interested in two instructors teaching the same week, that could be kinda cool).

Given the expense, I kind of doubt that I'll be able to make it this year unless I can manage to land a grant. The particular grant I have my eyes on funds for a July 1 '07-June 30 '08 cycle, so if I register for something at FAWC it will be something in July or August, I think. Which narrows down my choices a bit but still leaves me with a lot of enticing possibilities. (I do hope someone I know signs up for D.A. Powell's advanced poetry workshop, so I can hear about it! If you are looking for a workshop in June, you could do a whole lot worse than his -- he is a really terrific teacher.)

Despite the fact that it's expensive, I do think this is one of the best summer programs around for writers who want to get a lot of writing done rather than spending time with lectures or panels or networking, and who want to be a part of a thriving community of writers for a short while. I've been to several other summer conference/workshops, and while I have enjoyed all of them, Provincetown has definitely been my favorite. I've gone there for the past two summers and it's definitely changed me, changed how I approach my writing. Plus, you can go whale watching there. :) And I love Provincetown anyway, for all its faults -- I love the rainbow flags everywhere, the sense of community, the way the fog smells of harbor and the breeze tastes of salt.

If things go the way I hope they will, this would be my last summer workshop before diving into a low-residency MFA program. (Did I just say that out loud??) If it turns out I can't swing Provincetown this year, I may just do a workshop at the IU Writers' Conference -- cheaper, of course, because I don't have to travel or pay for lodging. Don't know yet if they are bringing anyone I'm interested in working with, though.

Tim asked about poetry dreams today. I've only dreamed about readings a couple of times, and don't find myself writing in my dreams too much, but I very often dream my way into the opening day of a summer workshop -- arriving, moving into a room (usually a dorm room in my dream), beginning to gather. Sometimes in these dreams I've forgotten my manuscript, or I show up in my pajamas, or the teacher takes an immediate dislike to me. No matter. I love the intensity, the concentrated energy of these short workshops (one reason I think a low-res MFA program would be great for me; the residencies sound like a blast). I love the fascinating people you can meet, and the way you just have to dive right in without holding back because there just isn't time to slowly get your feet wet. I love talking and thinking about poetry practically all the time for a few days. I know ... I'm weird. But I like it that way.

Ring In the New

Happy New Year, all! Wishing peace, happiness, and prosperity to you.

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Didn't parades used to consist of bands and floats and horses and stuff actually moving down the street? What is this crap where they set up in one spot and do a little show for the cameras? That's not a parade, that's a variety show.

That said, HGTV is showing the Rose Parade with no commercials and far less annoying announcers than the major networks. Which is a very good thing, especially if you have a DVR and can rewind to catch what you miss when you go to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. Muahahahaha.

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I rang in the New Year last night very quietly, in my house with my books and my cats (Lotus wishes to inform you that he Does Not Approve of firecrackers outside). I didn't get any significant writing done -- I always intend to, every New Year's Eve, and I never do -- but I did spend some time scribbling in my journal and some time reading poetry.

One of the best things about blogging, these past couple years or so, has been reading books by fellow bloggers. I know the Internet is full of lousy poets and bad-to-mediocre poetry, and when I first started blogging, I fully expected to find a lot of that. And I know that just because poetry gets published is no guarantee it's going to be any good -- I've been disappointed by many books published by perfectly reputable presses.

(Ooh! There's a herd of llamas in the Rose Parade! Llamas are so cute.)

Anyway, I've read a bunch of books and chapbooks by bloggers in the past couple of years, and I am happy to say that I've been pretty impressed, overall, by the quality. Maybe it's because the bloggers I read are mostly pretty serious about poetry, which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading what they have to say. (What you have to say. Oh bother. Who am I talking to here, anyway?) In the past several weeks I have read three in particular that, just in case you don't read all the same blogs I do and are thus well aware of these publications, I want to bring to your attention:

• Radish King by Rebecca Loudon. In some ways this is an odd little book, wider than it is tall to accommodate the postcard-proportioned cover image; the funky size does more than just serve the cover art, though, as it lets you know before you even open the book that this is not going to be your standard "pretty much like any other collection" poetry book. More than once I found my expectations about voice, language, and content subverted, in a good way. Books that do this usually make me pick up a pen and start writing, and this one was no exception -- in fact, I suspect this will be one of those books that I'll turn to when I feel stuck, so it can shake the words loose for me.
  
• Living Things by Charles Jensen. A slim little chapbook. I started out wanting to describe these poems as elegiac, but I think of elegies as being in some way about the person being mourned, and in this chapbook, the deceased beloved is present only as body -- we don't get a strong sense of what he was like in life. Instead, the experience of mourning itself takes center stage and serves almost as a character, a personage. There is the necessity of dealing with the body of the deceased, the necessity of funeral and ritual, the necessity of coping with the day-to-day post-funeral mundanities (e.g. bills that continue to arrive), and there is the way mourning rings out into the world and, for a time, changes everything the mourner sees. These poems aren't about the dead, or even really about the memory of the dead: they're about the living. I'd read many of these poems before, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to read them in the context of this small collection.
  
• Mortal by Ivy Alvarez. I spent part of my New Year's Eve with this collection, and I'm glad I did. These poems intertwine the matrilineal experience of breast cancer (which does often run in families) with the Demeter/Persephone story, here reconfigured as "Dee" and "Seph." To me, the book ends up not being "about" breast cancer so much as it is an exploration of the mother/daughter bond and what is passed from one generation to the next, which is sometimes dark and bloody and painful. Going through chemo must be kind of like going down to the underworld and hoping that eventually you'll be permitted to emerge again. Despite the simplicity of the language and structure of these poems, it's a complex book, and one I will probably return to.
  

On deck for today is Suzanne Frischkorn's Red Paper Flower. I know this will be a worthwhile read; her Spring Tide was, I think, the last poetry I read in 2005, and it was good stuff. I'd be willing to bet money that I'll be reading a full-length collection from her soon.

And if you're a poet reading this blog, I hope I'll be reading your poems soon, as well. Cheers and Happy New Year -- may 2007 bring lots of wonderful new poetry!