The Alchemist's Kitchen + The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go.

Susan Rich's blog, The Alchemist's Kitchen, has just the right recipe to make a delicious read: a little memoir, some travel, tips on such lit-biz topics as how to successfully apply for a residency and the fact that women poets might have an edge now in submitting to the Southern Review, as well as notable literary events, like the celebration of Madeleine DeFrees' 90th birthday at Elliot Bay Books. Susan, I've added yours to my blogroll! Thanks for the riches.

I've been reading Eliot Khalil Wilson's The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, a beautiful and brilliant debut book. The poems are well-crafted, full of feeling, often tender, and filled with stunning metaphorical aptness. I sometimes feel the strain behind a poem's reaching for the surprising metaphor; never in these poems did the metaphor or simile strike me as gratuitous. This is poetry that has earned its imagination, lived itself out before coming to the page. Here's the title poem, published at Slate. And a poem that just knocks me out, White Slip on the Paris Metro at From the Fishouse (you can hear him read the poem).

Eliot Khalil Wilson, an Arab-American, brings an interesting cultural mix into his writing with a subtlety that makes the shifting cultural landscapes fascinating. I learned about his work from my editor, Bryan Roth. I'm really glad I got the book and just hope Wilson's writing more books!

ReadWritePoem

Have you encountered the new-new thing? It's Facebook for poets, a new site called ReadWritePoem. Now, I know what you're thinking --- one MORE social networking site to keep up with? Of course, if you have FriendFeed, keeping up with all your social nets is easy, but even if you don't, just imagine it: Facebook only for poets! Founder Dana Guthrie Martin's idea is in its infancy, but think Google when it was just a little upstart down in the flats of Silicon Valley. Think of Facebook before it got all those ridiculous games and made us addicts to our own game-breaks (my personal favorite seems to be "icing" my opponents in Mafia Wars ... so now you know). Think of small, friendly Internet ponds that became real communities before becoming teeming metropolises.

ReadWritePoem has the potential to be a really addictive hangout for poets, a virtual Poets House that anyone in any town can go and find something cool to do in: do a writing exercise, read something, play, discuss, even make a New Year's resolution (I just made a big one).

I mean, where else can you find out about The Lumberyard's Roark Prize in Poetry, the prize for which is an entire issue dedicated to your poems? Not CRWROPPS, not Poets & Writers, and surely not on Facebook.

They have virtual book tours, Makeover Mondays and revision strategies, micropoetry (tweet a poem, anyone?).

I get the idea that if you can come up with it, they can find a corner for it. So take a look: right now it's a giant poetic thinktank. Later come the Modernist Wars, Poville, Zinger Poker and other Facebook-style frivolities.

New-new way to submit, read, and publish poetry

Those of us who cherish the book, a thing to hold in the hand, sometimes a literary object that also has visual beauty, find the new world of poetry publishing morphing into something electronic so fast you can almost hear the quarks fizz past.

Tonight I encountered the inevitable consequence of the increasingly new way to submit poems, using online "submission managers." Concomitant with online submitting is getting rejections via email, which means even on your cell phone. Tonight I was having drinks with friends and during a quiet moment in the conversation, checked my email and found a batch of poems had been rejected by a zine. Now, the note was cordial, signed by an editor and all, but I really missed that envelope bringing a piece of paper that had a signature scrawled on it. Maybe if I had to send out all those rejection letters, I'd do it by email too. I'm just thinking, if it can be made a little easier via email, perhaps a little something more personal can be said. Using a little of the time saved.

Still a Rocket Kid

My father is dying. When I got the news, and before I can get there to see him, I found myself wanting to reread -- and possibly rewrite -- my memoir of growing up with the crazy rocket engineer. Rocket Lessons has not (yet) sold, but I can post a few excerpts here to give you an idea. It's really why I started this blog, to surface the book. I think I really will have to go back and see what I can do with this record of the 50s-60s Cold War era in America, seen from the zany perspective of one the soldiers in the aerospace trenches -- days when real men wore pocket protectors, slide rules, and buzz cuts.

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I also googled my father and discovered something he never mentioned to any of us (maybe my mother knew but has forgotten). He patented a device to launch liquid fuel rockets. You can see his drawing and abstract still on file at the Patent Office.

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In other news, I never did blog about a lovely review my book Femme au chapeau received from Cheryl Snell at Library Thing in February. Thanks, Cheryl!

And if I did mention it, well, it's worth two mentions!

The Poetry Show

Last month I listened with special attention to Dona Stein's excellent "The Poetry Show" on KFRC-FM in Fort Collins, Colorado. Poet and editor Bryan Roth, Director of the Colorado Poets Association, was the featured guest discussing the editing of a poetry manuscript. He used my new manuscript, Gods of Water and Air, as the example. Here's a link on my page to that show.

This Sunday, Stein will interview Bryan Roth again. The topic on Sunday will be the work of Stephen Dobyns, author of ten books of poetry and twenty novels.

You can listen in online using the link on this page -- at 5 pm Pacific Time, 6 pm Mountain Time, 7 pm Eastern. Roth is an excellent editor, has studied with Dobyns, and is fascinating on the topic of modern poets and poetry. It should be a great half hour.

Dona Stein, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is the author of three chapbooks are Children of the Mafiosi, Heavenly Bodies, and most recently, Entering the Labyrinth, poems written while she was living in Greece.

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Last night I had the pleasure of becoming reacquainted with an old friend, poet Eric Halliwell. He has been living for many years in Guatemala, and was in town visiting friends. By chance, it turns out that he has a poem in the current issue of Umbrella, the zine for which I am a contributing editor for poetry. Eric told me this poem, "Like Picasso, Who Never Had to Pay for Anything," is one of only a handful he has published, though he has many, many more completed. He should send out lots more, judging by this one!

Novels - Serialization and National Novel Writing Month

I did it. I joined National Novel Writing Month, better known by the unpronounceable acronym as NaNoWriMo. The compact is to write novel in a month. A novel, for those who haven't yet googled word count for it, is 40,000 words. I started with 11,000 of a novel I began four years ago and keep meaning to get back to. So now I must do something along the lines of 1,200 words a day. Nobody mentioned anything about GOOD words.

At Flatmancrooked, there's an interesting interview with Shya Scanlon about serialized novels on the Web. Mr. Scanlon is the author of a serialized novel that has been mentioned in the same sentence with Dickens. But a good question is raised: why the Web? Reading long amounts of text online is, as we know, often painful. People stop reading. Print lulls you into focus. Why is that? Is it the relatively different postures, the light emerging from the screen, the action of turning pages that keeps a reader going?

Serialization is an interesting idea, but how do you sell installments online? Or do you just give away your work, as we bloggers do, hoping something will be returned per the laws of the universe?

Bloghopping

Just discovered Miriam Levine's wonderful blog, thanks to the Women in Poetry Listserv Blog Digest. A combination of literary and personal topics and nice visuals makes this delicious reading.

And thanks to Miriam's blogroll, I found a blog about fashion that's actually readable and interesting. The Thoughtful Dresser (Linda Grant) also writes about books and has this delightful subtitle on her blog: Because you can't have depths without surfaces. Too right.

Web hosting services - any suggestions?

I'm very sad that my supposedly commercial-grade web hosting service, www.aplus.net, has been inaccessible and unreachable by phone for more than six hours. I thought that paying a premium price would guarantee good support, information by phone in case of outages, enough backup redundancy to prevent long outages -- say, like six hours! -- to justify paying double what many web hosting services charge.

Recently, they put us through a laborious server upgrade, which cost me about seven hours in tech support calls, for some of which I had to wait more than thirty minutes in line. Now they have an unexplained, long outage and don't even bother to put a message on their telephone line explaining the situation and calming jittery customers.

Aplus.net, are you listening? I'm taking suggestions for a new multiple-domain hosting service with good tech support that costs less than $14 a month. And works with the Mac OS X.5.7 operating system.

Anyone have ideas? You have my attention!

Chapbooks from Carpe Diem! Press + Bloghopping

The popularity of chapbooks is rising, thanks to the need to have something to sell at readings and the atmosphere of insane competition in full-length book contests. Yet few chapbook publishers and printers exists to satisfy the growing need for producing chapbooks. A new chapbook service just debuted, Carpe Diem! Press. I found out about it because it's run by my poetry editor.

Carpe Diem Press combines great graphic design talent with economical prices and in-house proofreading -- and even copy-editing, if you want to pay for that service. They're in the process of building their site. The best way to find out more is to get in touch and ask for a quote and samples. I love their logo, a little guy jumping up and down. He looks to me like he's uttering a barbaric yawp!

My poem "Apple Pie Order" appeared on Your Daily Poem, a lovely site dedicated to the idea that "poetry need not be boring." Aimed at general readership, the editors of YDP look for poetry that combines accessibility and high standards of craft. Check it out.

New review of Letters to the World in poemeleon

Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess, has written a review of the anthology Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv. It's up at poemeleon. Gailey had exactly the same first thought I had: "I have to admit when I first heard about this anthology project I felt…dubious." She ends the review with a great summary of the reading experience: "... I like this anthology mostly for representing so many voices, so many points-of-view, so many stylistic choices, instead of the narrow range that most anthologies embrace. I’d compare it the experience to shopping at the produce department of the local A&P for many years, then suddenly finding yourself in the midst of Seattle’s Pike Place market, surrounded by stacks of marvelous fruits, vegetables and flowers from hundreds of countries, from every season, of every color and shape."

There are other goodies in the new issue of poemeleon, this issue's theme being Gender. Take a look.