Rocket Kids

Bloghopping Rocket Kid

2012-01-21T07:42:00.000-08:00

I found some litmags that appeal to a rocket kid. Moonshot Magazine not only has graphic poetry and an interesting blog, but links to interesting Indie publishers like Kristy Bowen's Dancing Girl Press, which has a chapbook series, a journal, and an art studio, plus a blog, dulcetly, with links to all things art and photo related.

I love doing this bloghopping, because as Adam Deutsch of Cooper Dillon Books reminded me in an interview I did with him for Fringe Magazine, writers and poets are community. We need to join hands in this venture of publishing our work, and that means helping bring attention to all the good work out there we encounter, as well as promoting our own.

Fire On Her Tongue

2011-12-31T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'm thrilled and honored to be included in the first e-Book anthology of contemporary women's poetry, published by Two Sylvias Press and edited by Annette Spaulding-Convy and Kelli Russell Agodon. Fire On Her Tongue is available as an e-book at Amazon, and is described as a ground-breaking literary project

Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry is the first electronic collection of poems by women writing today. Poets Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, Co-Editors of Crab Creek Review and Co-Founders of Two Sylvias Press, have collaborated on this ground-breaking literary project. Featuring over 70 of the most extraordinary poets from a variety of backgrounds and whose ages span from thirteen to ninety-one, Fire On Her Tongue showcases superbly crafted poems exploring the contemporary woman’s experience. Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry includes poems by Kim Addonizio, Nin Andrews, Madeline DeFrees, Patricia Fargnoli, Annie Finch, Kate Greenstreet, Lola Haskins, Jane Hirshfield, Keetje Kuipers, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alicia Ostriker, Natasha Sajé, Peggy Shumaker, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Zucker, and many other accomplished poets. Fire On Her Tongue is a unique collection created specifically with eBook readers in mind. This anthology has been entirely produced with a zero-carbon footprint as a “green” way to share today’s most exciting poetry with a larger audience. Fire On Her Tongue is an amazing resource for any reader or student who wants to explore an in-depth selection of work from some of today’s strongest women poets.

Light, Light, Light!

2011-12-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

Time to bring out the old light panel, even though the days are getting perceptibly longer. Still now enough light in my eyes to lift my spirits the way spring does. I bought this natural light panel that you look into for a half hour each day and it does something indescribable to your feelings. So of course I had to try to describe it in this prose poem, now appearing in the current issue of Spirits, out of Indiana University Northwest.

The Pearl. Every morning for an hour, I stare into a row of fluorescent tubes called a Brite-Wave, remedy for a part of brain that has forgotten how to bloom these winter mornings. Following printed directions, I gaze as if floating in the mother-of-pearl pool I once swam in at an Arizona resort at midnight, floating in opalescence beneath the vaulted dark. Light sears my retina with atoms. They are supposed to pry open the sleeping folds. For thirty minutes a day this beam raises my mental sun. The manual advises glancing occasionally, but more and more I am compelled to stare, and the effects are noticeable. The first morning I can barely lift my coffee cup while watching the light. The day after, I pedal my wheeling thoughts into star-fields. A week in, and I am bobbing in a raft on foaming waves. Two weeks, and I can backstroke any foggy morning, do laps despite the rain. Tomorrow, I’ll be able to shove old Sol aside and with my own focused stare illuminate the parking lot.

Reading hour and the new world

2011-12-16T20:17:00.000-08:00

I spend so much time looking at my phone anyway, between reading email, texting, facebooking, googling, and playing games, that I decided I might as well try out reading books as well. To my surprise, a Kindle book is downloadable to an iPhone as well as an iPad, and the text is very readable. I already read poetry on my phone from such sites as Poetry Foundation and poets.org. It seemed to me that for 99 cents or even $9 I could test-drive my idea. And I'm still driving.

One of the things I discovered is the instant gratification of buying an eBook. Last night I had a wish to read a new novel that's a contemporary version of Midsummer Night's Dream, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I debated: the library? the book's too new -- Amazon, too slow -- B&N, too expensive. Kindle's price was cheaper than print and the delivery time was RIGHT NOW!

That's when I realized I wasn't just in the reading hour, I was in a whole new publishing world whose rules aren't just about carrying your library around with you. It's about much more ... changing font sizes, getting a book ASAP, copying quotations, searching for names or specific phrases or words. It's much more than reading words on a page, it can be using them for research purposes. I'm getting quickly hooked and also hooked on seeing how different is the experience of reading a book this way than the other way. I wonder if there will be a tiered publishing format, similar to the straight-to-DVD movie, maybe there will be straight-to-Kindle books. I guess some self-published books already are.

Which makes me wonder about the need for eBook review magazines. How do you sort it all out and find what you want to read in this new world? We need review zines to help. Maybe I'll start one!

Publishers, Zines, and the Changing Landscape

2011-12-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

Discovered a fascinating and informative page by Aaron Shephard on self-publishing and the changing landscape of eBooks.

Speaking of publishers, the ever-innovative micro press Cooper Dillon Books now has a link to my interview with publisher Adam Deutsch published at Fringe. Stay tuned for more. I plan to get Deutsch talking again about poetry publishing and the literary community.

Found some new (to me) zines I want to read and submit work to: for flash fiction, Smokelong Quarterly and Linebreak which describes itself as "a weekly magazine with a bias for good poetry." Always fun bloghopping the literary Internet.

New poems published in Umbrella

2011-12-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm honored to be included in Umbrella Journal's fifth anniversary issue. the Orsorum section features my work, as well as that of:

C.B. Anderson
Seth Braver
Michael Cantor
Robin Chapman
Maryann Corbett
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Paul Hostovsky
Rose Kelleher
Kathleen Kirk
John Milbury-Steen
Ken Poyner
Jason Primm
Jennifer Reeser
Sarah J. Sloat
David Stephenson
Sherry Chandler (Book Review)

Huge congratulations to publisher/editor Kate Bernadette Benedict for steering this publication to a wider audience, through innovative and fresh ideas, and also creating an umbrella for Tilt-A-Whirl and Carmine Street Metrics. Umbrella is a journal unlike any I know of, with surprises and new dimensions all the time. Here's to another five years of delight!

Occupy with Poetry!

2011-11-19T11:52:00.000-08:00

Among the many Occupy events I've been following are literary ones. It's a good moment in history for poets and writers to speak up through their art. I was happy to see that Fringe Magazine started an Occupy area on their blog. An Occupy poetry anthology is online and still accepting more works, I've heard. And I'm sure much more literature will come out of this new movement some are calling "the end of the beginning" of a change in world consciousness of equality and justice.

I feel that, as the Arab Spring demonstrated, and the Autumn Occupy is reinforcing, a new awareness of the need for more humane values is spontaneously emerging among great numbers of people on our planet. I don't believe this can be contained within politics -- certainly not politics as usual. It's organic and self-organizing, as my wise and funny friend Emily Levine pointed out, the way water molecules organize themselves to be liquid. You can't stop or even define this kind of thing. You can't demand it produce its list of demands. But you can make poetry about it.

Bloghopping

2011-11-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

I was flattered to be asked by novelist and publisher Linda Leith to contribute one of my photos to her wonderful, rich online literary salon. Those are my leaves across the top, behind the banner! I feel like I've started a new venture, photography. All with my new iPhone 4s (yes, Apple please deposit the ad revenue directly into my Paypal account). I do love taking photos with my new phone. And I do love Linda Leith's website! Full of interesting visuals and articles and interviews.

While I'm bloghopping, I want to spread the word about a blog on a new film venture---and you can be part of it! As a supporter of The Spirit of Ireland. It's a new film by the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alan Cooke. You can see a trailer for the film on this page. Cooke, who won an Emmy for his film Home about being an immigrant in New York, says of his new project: "The Spirit of Ireland is a self-funded independent project. It is been made on the good will and donations of people who love Ireland from around the world."Even if you don't have a tiny bit of Irish in your genes, it's a chance to be part of an uplifting film on an ancient and spirit-rich land.

Bloghopping & webrowsing Italy

2011-11-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

A new television series on an innovator and legend -- no, not Steve Jobs, though that's not a bad idea -- Leonardo da Vinci, the Huffington Post reports.

Flash mob! Italian style. Why do I never get called?

If you're in the San Francisco area and love Renaissance and Baroque painters, you might want to see Masters of Venice, on exhibit through February. Why did they have to put the De Young so far away? Or fail to rebuild that freeway? I lament, as an East Bay denizen, how long it takes to get to any of the museums. Ah, well. A day well spent.

Rambling the blogosphere

2011-11-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

In my rambles around the blogosphere, I've had my mind on novels and memoirs, because I'm working on a novel. Here are some interesting stops along your way, if you're similarly inclined: a Wild Irish poet's book on Ireland, the Plot Whisperer, and a revision checklist. Plus a few more.

Wild Irish Poet

The Plot Whisperer

Revision Checklist

Pacing

Here's a taste of my novel:

Chapter Three. Rome, Day One.

In a room one floor below the Perls, Norman and Kathleen weren’t sleeping, either. Norman was working on his laptop, for which Rick had found a power cord, while Kathleen paced in her pink nightgown and tossed out place names randomly. Norman recorded everything she said, then tried to fit each word into a table of places and dates.
“Scacciapensieri!” Kathleen said suddenly and stopped. “That’s the hotel I booked us into for Siena. I’m sure of it.”
“Really? Because you researched so many hotels in Siena, and I don’t remember that name. Spell it.”
“You’re kidding, Norman. You know I can’t spell in English. I certainly don’t spell in Italian!”
“Well, say it again, slowly.”
“Ska-cha-pen-sor-i.”
“Hmm. That doesn’t sound Italian. And it doesn’t sound the way you said it the first time.”
Kathleen turned and faced him, putting her hands on her narrow hips.
“This was your idea, Norman. Free association. Spelling isn’t part of free association. You look it up. You’re the researcher.”
“I’m an economist.”
“Whatever.”
“Okay, say it again.”
“Sko-chow-pan-sier-y. This isn’t going to work. I can’t remember the dates! If we don’t have the dates right—”
“We can call the hotels and ask them. All you have to do is remember which hotels you booked in which places.”
Kathleen sighed. “I must have talked to hundreds of hotels in the last six months, booking tours for more groups than you have zeros in your ledger books.”
“We don’t use books anymore, Kathleen, we use software.”
“Whatever. Everyone’s computer-crazy these days.”
“Just relax, walk if you need to. Do you want anything? I can ring the desk if you’d like a glass of wine.”
“Wine will make me sleepy, and if I’m sleepy I can’t pace, and if I can’t pace I can’t associate. Start again!”
“Assisi.”
“Forget that one. Move on.”
“Florence.”
“Firenze!”
“Okay, Firenze.”
“Nothing. Wait! Something with an ‘m’. . . .”
“An ‘m?’”
“A villa. Maybe near the Boboli Gardens.”
“Good . . . go on.”
Kathleen turned and sank into the chair.
“I’m too tired for this!”
“This is when it will work best.”
“Who elected you psychiatrist?”
“It’s a technique my therapist used.”
“Huh! Is that right?”
Norman put his laptop aside, got up from the bed, and came over to her. He put his fingers on her temples and rubbed gently.
“You need a neck rub. You’re all tense in the face, which means your neck is tense. Would you like to have me rub your neck?”
Kathleen gave in for a moment and let Norman rub her temples, but then she suddenly sprang up.
“No! Not if we’re going to get more of this out of my brain. I don’t want to be up all night.”
Norman sighed, went back to the bed and picked up his computer.
“Firenze. Boboli.”
“Villa . . . Cora!”
“Are you sure?”
“What the hell do you mean, am I sure? Of course not! If only Massimo were here. He’d remember.”
“Kathleen, why don’t we just look up all the hotels in Firenze and call them all?”
“Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how many inns, hotels, and villas there are around Florence? How many people are accommodated in Florence at this time of year? And how many are just lining up to grab our rooms if we don’t show?”
“I’m sure Rick will help. And Sandra. And maybe we can get a few others to make calls.”
“Norman, you would make a hopeless travel agent.”
“At least I know how to use a computer.” He said it with his head down, staring into the screen because he was afraid of his own sarcasm but unable to resist the temptation.
She didn’t fail to respond as he expected.
“You are a goddamn idiot! You think a computer would have made a difference? What if someone had hacked into it and stolen all our information? What if you had taken your stupid laptop out and the gypsies had nabbed it? Don’t give me that. Don’t act like it’s my fault!”
Her voice rose to a pitch that distressed him. He felt it had the potential of disturbing people even through the walls, but if he said anything more it would just set her off. Norman had learned that the secret of a long marriage was silence, applied at strategic moments.
Kathleen paced faster, frowning. His technique worked, because she let her feet pick up the agitation while her brain began to search again for useful memories.
“Okay, Villa Cora in Firenze. I’m sure of it, because I remember you said let’s spend the money and I said you were crazy, and you insisted that we have one really fantastic hotel and the rest of the way we could make do. Villa Cora used to belong to Tchaikovsky’s mistress or something. It’s practically a historic site itself. I’m sure we booked there. We can call them in the morning.”
“Good!” Norman typed “Villa Cora” into several slots. “Now all we have to do is call and ask what the dates are and when we have to check in to secure our reservations.”
“Okay, that’s all I can do tonight.”
“Honey, that’s great. We can do it. It will take a few days, but we can get all the information back. And then we can talk to the group about the money.”
Kathleen came over to the bed and got in. Within minutes she was snoring. Norman continued to stare into his laptop, wishing that she had at least thanked him for the idea of association, but at the same time formulating her
excuses: she was tired, she felt the stress of responsibility, she didn’t handle criticism well, she was tense in the neck.
At last he powered down, put away the computer, and got back in bed. He lay in bed beside a snoring Kathleen, who never had any trouble falling asleep. He thought about how tomorrow they would begin their life-changing adventure. When most people want to change their lives, they look forward—but not Norman. He found his key to a new life in looking back⎯way back, all the way to the Italian Renaissance.
Norman was happier in the past than in the present. He carried volumes within: volumes of economic treatises and the histories of markets. Statistics mumbled inside the vault of his skull, and he lived with numbers much more comfortably than with people. The only people he could really understand had been dead for centuries. They were the Italian artists and architects of the Renaissance, the popes and doges and civilized princes.
Like most middle-aged people, he longed for better days, which meant the past. In Norman’s case, however, it was the far distant past. His nostalgic urges were deeply satisfied by the study of history. He had found a way to indulge his nostalgia beyond his wildest dreams in forming The Renaissance Club. He had never imagined he could actually convince his colleagues to come on this tour of Renaissance Italy. But now that his great dream was coming true, he wasn’t going to let a few skeptics spoil it. All his career he had been surrounded by skeptics; that was almost the definition of an economist. He had a chance for something different now.
Rome was out there, and somewhere in it was his renaissance. Although he and Kathleen and Sandra had already explored a good bit of Rome, this was the real threshold of the adventure. He wanted to be fresh for it, but he found himself wide-eyed in the dark, wondering what the Sistine Chapel would be like and how close he could get to Bernini's sculpture of Teresa in Ecstasy. He wished Sir Kenneth Clark were with them. He had such an articulate excitement about history, an excitement he, Norman, failed at every turn to convey to his friends. But maybe Jacob’s friend George had an exciting way about him and could spark their enthusiasm. He hoped so. If he couldn’t, Norman was afraid this would be a very short adventure.

Sea Stories

2011-10-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to have five of my ocean-related poems in the Fall issue of Sea Stories. Editor K.r. Copeland selects poetry for the Littoral Currents section of this beautiful. My poems appear in this issue along with those of J.P. Dancing Bear, fellow San Pedran (by birth) Larry Kuechlin, Lyn Lifshin, Janice Wilson Stridick, Virgil Suarez, Skylaar Amman, Lynn Fanock, Nancy Scott, L.B. Sedlacek, Arthur Seeley, Tim Tomlinson, Andrea Witzke Slot, Norbert Krapf, W.F. Lantry, and many more. It's a packed issue and full of lovely images.

Interview with an innovative publisher

2011-09-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

In my interview for Fringe Magazine with Adam Deutsch, Publisher/Editor of Cooper Dillon Books, most interesting to me was his idea that poetry is on the outskirts of our culture because of an absence of community. We fail to see ourselves -- the poetry world -- as community, and often fail to act as a community, supporting each other in ways that would strengthen the art itself.

Community isn't a new concept, but it's newly emerging as an alternative to the conventional ways of doing things, a more collaborative way to live. You see it in movements like co-housing and sustainable community gardening. A sense of being connected and that we all benefit from working together, not competing with each other. Replacing competition with cooperation. Perhaps it's too much to expect poets and writers not to feel competitive in the difficult process of getting published and developing an audience. But the point Adam made in the interview was that just a little more sense of community would benefit the entire poetry world. More books would get sold and read. I think he's hit on a big idea. More power to him and his press.

Fringe - My Interview with Adam Deutsch

2011-09-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Fringe Magazine has just today published my interview with the fascinating Adam Deutsch, Publisher and Editor of Cooper Dillon Books, a poetry press in San Diego, California.

Adam Deutsch has a novel approach to small-press publishing: he avidly collaborates with poets and responds to manuscripts within five weeks of submission. But perhaps to me the most radical idea he has is to find and publish -- and even in some cases, create -- manuscripts of transcendence and lasting importance. High aims, ones I'm in complete sympathy with, as we seem to be getting overwhelmed with poetry publications that may not even outlast the year, let alone a decade. It's a provocative read. And more to come.

My poem in Tiferet

2011-09-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

I'm so pleased to have my poem "The River" in the current issue of Tiferet Journal. You'd love the issue, so buy a copy if you can. Here's the poem, which is also in my forthcoming book, Gods of Water and Air:

The River

Cookies crumble in the pockets of my jeans.
I save them in case I need extra fortune.
The one today told me to relax.
Mom always said, What are you waiting for?
Why are you so impatient?
She couldn’t have been right about both,
could she? I just grabbed the nearest one
and I notice as I chew and swallow the pieces,
they all melt into the same thing: loss, anger, joy
swirl down the stream outside the restaurant
I left winking at the statue of Lao-Tzu on his ox.

Take some more, they said,
I took a hunk of architecture,
some random windows—open, close.
I took the cheapest ticket, the desperate caress,
the stolen insight. Moments flowed
through my ears, whispering
that nothing is ever lost, just changed
into memory. I should have done more
with my life.

All time exists at once.
I think Einstein said that, or Lao-Tzu, breathing
down my neck, wanting his river back.
I cross carefully, my shoulders wearing wings
of fog. I step on small islands, all the souls
I have ever known gone
hanging around my neck.

A Poem in Blue Fifth Review

2011-09-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to have a poem in Sam Rasnake's online journal Blue Fifth Review! I'm pleased to have work alongside other wonderful pieces.

Future of the Book - artifact?

2011-08-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

As a rocket kid and the author of books, I was intrigued by this thoughtful piece in the Guardian about the possible future of the book in the post-Kindle era.

The most interesting thing in it was my introduction to the term "wilfing." The "What was I looking for?" aspect of being online seems on the surface antitethical to the concentration required to read cogently, say, a piece of literature, even a short one. I think it's doing something else to us: it's breaking down the linear thinking we have been schooled in for centuries. What does that open the door to? A way of making connections that can seem random, but might often be intuitive. An openness to a new way of connecting things, perhaps. Or perhaps, as some suggest, just a giant waste of an afternoon.

I don't know, but I do know that I have "chanced" upon some amazingly helpful finds in my wilfing hours, things that found their way into poems, grant proposals, business plans, conversations, and sometimes just the sense of wonder that I prize most in my days.

Wilf away, I say, but then set aside time to focus. Both and, not either or.

BIG NEWS!

2011-08-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that I've just signed a contract with Kitsune Books to publish my new poetry collection, Gods of Water and Air, in 2012! It's been a long time putting this one together, and finding the right publisher. I feel very lucky!

Kitsune Books describes its mission this way:
Kitsune Books was founded in 2006 to make available to the reading public an eclectic variety of artistic, well-written books that are slightly off the beaten path. We publish literary and some genre fiction, nonfiction literary commentary and memoir, and poetry.

And making it also special for me is to be a fellow Kitsune author alongside my friend Jeannine Hall Gailey, whose new collection, She Returns to the Floating World, was just published by Kitsune. It's an amazing book, combining Jeannine's unique blend of Japanese myths and folklore, Shinto spirits, philosophy and popular culture.

The Writing Life

2011-07-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Reading Annie Dillard's inspiring and reassuring book of that name, and found this nugget, which made me feel so much better about how slowly I'm editing my novel:

Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. working full time, he wrote a page a day. that is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day -- a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived.

My interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey is up at Fringe

2011-06-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing for Fringe Magazine a fellow rocket kid and poet, Jeannine Hall Gailey. Her myth-based poetry collection She Returns to the Floating World was just published by Kitsune Books. In the interview, Gailey discusses her process and sources, including how she came to use fantasy, mythology, and comic book characters in poetry, and why she thinks poetry continues to dwell on the outskirts of our culture. She's a fascinating subject and the book is a terrific read, unlike any other book I've read. Grab a copy, you won't be sorry! And will learn a lot about Japanese mythology.

Fathers & poems

2011-06-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Happy Father's Day! The subject of the relationship to a father has been a rich source in poetry. Today I'm missing my complicated, troublesome, creative, and vibrant father, who died a year and a half ago. My faovrite last memories of him:

At the Easel with Alzheimer's

My father is painting in the basement: blue,
green, yellow. The cinderblock wall’s white-
wash is tanned with dust and the ocean view
obscured by a flapping sheet of vinyl. It fights

the wind. He says he's inspired to blue. My phone call
came to his studio and I was greeted: I know you.
You’re the pharmacist, right? The pall
on his memory has not dimmed his bad taste

in jokes or how at the easel he’s always affable
over the scribble of boar’s bristle, the give
of canvas to brush. I skip over laughable
lapses, as when he asks me where I live

and then pretends he was kidding. Name-
dropping, his mind grows patches, nicks
and spores like the salt on his aluminum
windows that will eventually make them stick.

Painting down there, his panes always closed
to keep it warm and dry, not a hint of sea
outside. What are you working on? His nose
nearly on the canvas, he can only say,

It’s getting better, going somewhere. It’s green,
blue, and not as grim as it sounds. His brain
grows lacy and colors squirm like the skeins
of yarn above the basement washing machine.

I’m frightened of how much he forgets,
this new breeze that unzips our history,
but I say, Don’t fight the wind. Be a net.
Catch the world by letting the knots slip.

- first appeared in Fringe Magazine

Here's another father poem I love:

Those Winter Sundays
By Robert Hayden 1913–1980

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Bloghopping: Listening to Literature

2011-06-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

Found a new zine that publishes audio versions of fiction and nonfiction -- The Drum. A nice companion to Whale Sound, which does audio publication of poetry. Words on breath, what literature was meant to be, at least short literature like poems, essays, and stories. With authors like Gina Ochsner, Susan Orlean, and Paul Harding, this looks like excellent listening.

Whale Sound currently has Wendy Babiak's wonderful "Ekphrasis on a Screensaver." Take a listen.

Non-contest poetry book publishers and the paradigm

2011-06-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Sparked by the Poets and Writers article on contests, and Anis Shivani's article in the Huffington Post, the debate about whether contests are good for poetry flares up high again. We seem to be locked into the contest paradigm, and yet the natives are restless, at least some of them are. Marginalization, as always, creates resistance, rebellion, and ultimately revolution. I am speaking metaphorically, of course, but I do think the anti-contest sentiment is building, even among poets who have supported it in the past. Just a quick look at the numbers reveals why: those who need to publish poetry books are too numerous for the number of contest wins available -- by far.

So what new model of poetry publishing can be developed, given the cultural marginalization of the art? I've felt for a long time that e-publishing, which is changing the landscape of prose publishing very quickly, will exert a similar transformative effect on po-biz. Perhaps a little more emphasis on biz -- on how to attract audiences and book buyers -- would help.

Poetry book contest + updates on my Non-Contest Publishers Page

2011-06-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

Anis Shivani, in a Huffington Post article about poetry book contests, makes an excellent point about how contests damage the art:

Is this the best way to discover new poetry talent in the country? What happens to editorial judgment, consistent aesthetic vision, commitment to particular values, building a movement, advocating for a particular style, and creating a critical mass of new writing if the contest model is allegedly based in "impartiality" and "blindness"--in other words, pretends to be the exemplar of democracy, egalitarianism, and disavowal of values?

My page of poetry book publishers who read outside of contests -- and presumably exercise this type of editorial judgment, rather than giving it over to grad student screeners -- has been updated. The venerable Tupelo Press was added, and also some information about reading periods and reading fees (the new sneaky way of getting the same amount of money as in a contest, but with a different evaluation paradigm).

I agree with Shivani's basic idea: we need to rethink in this country how poetry is edited and published if we don't want to see poetry further marginalized and made tepid and culturally insignificant. A lot of people like poetry and have never heard of any of the books being published to great fanfare. What's wrong with this picture? Publishers complain about the media ignoring poetry, but I wonder if there's a good reason it mostly gets ignored.

Saint Monica + bloghopping

2011-06-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received Mary Biddinger's terrific new chapbook, Saint Monica, out from Black Lawrence Press. I was lucky enough to be asked to write a blurb and so get to see this marvelous, original, biting, and witty collection before it came out. I can only reiterate my comment on the back:

Biddinger crisply narrates these memorable tales that entwine horror and sensual discovery, using deft rhythms, head-snapping line breaks, and highly original imagery."

I give it the highest praise a poet can: I wish I'd written it. Buy the book!

For a fresh taste, try tongues of the ocean.

Bloghopping + books by women men should read

2011-05-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Nic Sebastien (Very Like a Whale), I discovered the wonderful A Year with Rilke, which pairs poems with art by friends of Rilke. One of the great things poetry online can do is pair with visuals. Another great thing it can do, as Nic's sites so brilliantly showcase, is become sound again, rise from the flat page into the music poetry is meant to be.

Also was sent a link to Joyland's blog about Esquire Magazine's list of 250 books by women all men should read. A friend pointed out the that the list for books by men all women should read was only 75 books. As it should be!

Pirene's Fountain is open to submissions for the October issue.

Dreamin' of Dylan

2011-05-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

Poet of our generation, happy 70th, Dylan! He's still got it, the lyrical chops, in my opinion. Interesting that so much of the best poetry of our generation has been in the form of song lyrics. A lot of people argue that lyrics and poetry aren't the same, but I think that's an old-fashioned view. To me -- writing both -- they're part of a continuum. So here are a few of my favorite Dylan poems.

Dreamin' of You

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Someone recently wrote to me and asked for work for an anthology defining our unique generation. I wish I had written a poem about Dylan to send!

Poetry for non-poets + Saint Monica

2011-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's Giving Voice session at a two-day arts seminar this May brought poetry to leaders from fields unaccustomed to considering the art: leaders from every sector: finance, social services, arts administration, marketing, real estate, education, media, health, engineering, insurance and government. Bravo! to the Foundation for reaching out beyond the teaching community and bringing poetry to a wider audience of leaders. A very interesting way of carrying out the mission of supporting poetry in our culture.

In other news: Mary Biddinger's brilliant chapbook, Saint Monica, is out from Black Lawrence Press. Having had a sneak peek, I'll say that you should rush over there and pre-order a copy right now! (Ships June 1.) You won't be sorry.

Why I Like Weather

2011-05-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

It's a restless, atmospheric spring day, I've been listening to Bach and looking at gorgeous images of Dutch tulip fields, and my own poem came to mind. This is from Earth Lessons.

WHY I LIKE WEATHER

Famous for always being there, it takes no hikes
or long vacations, leaving forty beeps on the answering
machine. Evasive, evocative, weather
is as much what you see through as what you see.
This afternoon my dog and I headed out
to find a pyramid of taffy-rolled cloud
wrinkling the sky’s forehead. We circuited
the neighborhood, bemused by vast aerial doings.
The cumulus spread away, thin as bouillon.
Sun winked on the flanks of an airplane -- last buffalo
roaming the high plain. “He’s smiling again”
I said to my dog, as if the sun
were a cloudy-headed Apollo
dashing from horizon to horizon.

I often take comfort from weather
as a folk remedy. It’s good for blame, lovemaking,
moods, price dips, metaphors in talk of politics. Whether
you can think straight may be attributed to it --
"I'm under a cloud today." Forecasters will say,
“There’s not much weather out West” --
as if air, moisture and electricity
flowing at the speed of thought around the globe
does not achieve the status.
Farmers and scientists pigeonhole energies
with chewy words: drizzle, Nor’easter -- like naming
your bloodstream Sally or your elbow Sam.
The sway of a temblor underfoot
makes me think weather churns underground,
loose and roving as comets and sea spouts,
ball lightning, St. Elmo’s Fire, the katabatic winds
called foehn, Chinook, cow-killer.

Does the equator’s airy calm -- the doldrums-- seep out
of the planet’s bellybutton?
Is that a huge stomach I hear underfoot?
I like the Hindu belief that ultra-fine weather
circulates in our bodies, too subtle for computed tomography.
I suspect similar currents whirl inside earth’s core
spinning magma like clothes in a dryer.
Weather crashes planes, sends killers
on rampages. Is it subject to the moon’s pull?
Does El Nino come from rays of hypnotism?
I like to believe anything’s possible, exercise
the muscle of wonder so it does not atrophy
and make me overly scientific, a calculating cynic
who sees a cloud and thinks only of ice.

We’re made of weather -- electrons twirling
like tiny twisters, blood-tides rushing and pumping.
How can anyone predict how we'll blow?
Or what will come of our combative forces --
disease, health, madness, illumination?
Wild planets with fierce cycles of emotion,
we wobble on elliptical trajectories
toward idealized destinations,
subject to massive buildups of uncertainty.
We can be exalted as the galaxies and atoms
who share our mad momentum. -- But enough of chaos.

We need the comfort of names and laws.
A name can call you, but no one can be predicted by it.
And that’s why I like weather: its events evoke
daily self-explorations that slam restlessly
hither and yon, seeking shape then frantically undoing it
for something better -- or perhaps just wilder and wetter.

My review of Barbara Crooker's More up at The Pedestal

2011-04-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to have my review of Crooker's newest collection appearing in The Pedestal magazine's new issue. It's hard work, but I like book reviewing, which is a way of concentrating on poetry in an arc of expression, as a good collection must be. Here's my pull-quote from the review: "In these glass-half-empty times, Barbara Crooker takes a radical stance: she wants more. She celebrates the life of the senses in poems of praise, gratitude, and grief."

I had the recent pleasure of receiving an in-depth critique of a poem I'm working on and thought about the value of our connections as poets, how no one works in poetry, or in any art form, alone. The myth of the lone artist is just that: a myth. We must have lots of solitude, but we must also have lots of exchange, if only by studying one another's work and the work that's gone before. There is no solo planet for a poet. We are intertwined in this work.

Poem for Easter

2011-04-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

After Reading Dante’s Paradiso

We live in a heaven we take great pains to avoid.
Shielding our cheeks from a winter sky’s
chilled fur, we hunch against the brush of air
that has rushed gloriously everywhere. We listen
into our phones so as not to be pierced
by arias in the pines. Clench worry’s hands
to keep a woodpecker’s drumming
from entering our bones. Stay separate.
Refuse to sail a cloud into evening’s gold.

I circle your neighborhood. You switch on your motor
to cancel my hellos and drive by, tunnel-gazing
at the road. You will not allow yourself
to be distracted by a flock of red butterflies
that seem to have settled on the quince. You work
at not seeing the cherry trees’ candlelight parade.
Busy yourself steadying a tea tray on your head.
It’s hard not to look into each other’s eyes,
down wells of the water we daily draw up,

but bliss is trying to leach into our cells
from the sheer forces of nature and humanity.
Happiness can sprout in a moment, absurd
amid the gray towers strafed by centuries.
Don’t make a habit of paving over any space
where a tiny flower could pop or hold
your breath, so you can’t nose around
as easily as an old dog finds a neighborly scent
and comes upon another circle of delight.

from Another Circle of Delight

Mesmer + Dickinson

2011-04-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

Another for April, thinking we might get more of the unusual April showers today. First appeared in Pirene's Fountain:

Mesmer

Rain can be like Chopin,
all piano strings
and syncopated pauses, geometry
of blings under wheels
and rubber heels. A bliss
baptism from branches.
Drooled harmonies.
On your neck, wet
kisses slithering. Rings
around plop into pools:
ting, ting, ting, ting. Scriabin
zithering loss up your edges,
then his departure’s
sudden, cold feathering.

And one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, which I hope to memorize:

HE fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

A poem for Earth Day

2011-04-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Every Morning I Try

to pronounce a divine name perfectly, knowing

I can’t really say its swallow-swing

or enunciate the syllables a mockingbird

loops in medleys, can’t whisper vowels

of an airplane’s rhyming trail.

Names like that must be repeated

as a flower lets pollen fly. I should mimic

the closed bud’s wise pause.

My human mouth can hardly shape

the million-zinnia alpha letter, let alone

the final plosive dazzle –

but I can hum the consonants

of this green-button day –

and add several bandaged overtones

to the morning-setting moon,

echo two doves speaking

to my dog, who rolls and rolls

on the name’s final Ah.

Since I cannot make that pure sound,

I will get down on the grass and roll with him,

then give the next being I meet

a courteous consonant

dangling an ocean vowel.

first appeared in The Cortland Review (with sound file)

April poem

2011-04-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

From my collection Earth Lessons, because the roses are getting ready to pop.

ROSA MAJALIS
Leaflets long, pubescent. Flowers deep pink in a corymb. Hips large and bottle-shaped.-- Rose catalog.

With five slim petals
she satisfies her procreative need,
enticing flying feet and wings to collude
in a rage to be perpetual.
Behind her sepals’ five-fingered fan
she awaits the sun’s caress. Sly señora,
she knows how to meet a warm hand.
Her private core is deeply gold,
pollinated with the musk of want
becoming tall. Each lingam of light
waggles its cache of pollen in the breeze.
Her stamens climb the sky
but her roots descend
eternity’s steep stair.
Such fragile music
wafts from a gorgeous maw,
yet it excites in us raw
and lovely hunger.

Listening to poetry -- looking at animated poems

2011-04-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was happy to find a link on Facebook the other day to a poetry video that was a collaboration between the wonderful artist and poet Patricia Wallace Jones, Beau Blue and his Blue's Cruzio Café, and me, animating my poem One Night, Light.

It made me think about the mixed-media possibilities for online poetry. I went to listen to the recordings of my poems that have appeared online and updated my website's Online Reader, which I'd like to rename Online Reader and Radio.

Billy Collins may have helped kick off this trend of animated poetry and mixed media spoken work, with his "The Dead." Whoever started it, it's a trend to watch. A really satisfying experience, to combine art and poetry, animation and poems.

Listening to poetry - Part 2

2011-04-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Nic Sebastien, for featuring my reading of "I Spend an Afternoon with Monet" at Voice Alpha!

If you haven't spent time at Voice Alpha and Whale Sound, you're missing one of the most delicious poetry experiences you can have online.

So listen to some great poetry in April, as well as reading and writing it!

Some other places with the sounds of poetry are The Cortland Review and qarrtsiluni. More zines are getting on this bandwagon -- a very good thing for poetry! Any suggestions? I'd like to compile a list.

Listening to great poetry

2011-04-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the wealth of free digital media, it's possible to incorporate listening to great poets read their work into your daily writing and reading practice. Last night i heard a great poet, Kim Addonizio, read, and it had a good effect on my approach to today's work. Here are some youtube clips. She read with the wonderful poet Susan Browne, and Kim also played some blues harmonica.

Kim Addonizio - Muse
Kim & Susan - several poems

And some of my other favorites:
Galway Kinnell - Oatmeal
Robert Hass -- I Am Your Waiter Tonight, and My Name Is Dimitri

And of course, I'm on Youtube too, though not great! (Yet. I'm working hard though.)

Poet Interviews

2011-04-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

Ren Powell is interviewed on Fiona Robyn's Writing Our Way Home blog.

I am fascinated with poets being interviewed, the questions asked and the answers given, opening windows into the intensely private and individual process of creating poems.

I have an upcoming interview on Fringe with the fascinating Jeannine Hall Gailey. Stay tuned!

Kim Addonizio reading in Walnut Creek + How A Poem Happens

2011-04-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite poets, and my teacher, Kim Addonizio, is reading at the Walnut Creek Library on Tuesday night. Here's the Contra Costa Times announcement. Should be a great evening. Music too!

Brian Brodeur's blog How a Poem Happens is great reading if you want the behind-the-scenes story of notable poems. This week's interviewee is Gray Jacobik, with Brian asking questions about revision, the trigger for writing, what part inspiration plays, and all those wonderful things we talk about endlessly when poets get together.

Happy April poem-writing! (Or revising.)

Big Poetry Book Giveaway Continues

2011-04-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

You can enter here, to win either my book or Dorianne Laux's, or go to Kelli Russell Agodon's site for links to lots of poets giving away one copy of their book + one copy of another poetry book at the end of April. To enter, just leave your name and email!

Hope April Poetry Month finds you drafting, revising, reading, and networking with other poets! I'm going to an online workshop this afternoon.

Big Poetry Book Giveaway a Hit!

2011-04-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

Kelli Russell Agodon's brainstorm of the Big Poetry Book Giveaway appears to be taking hold, with lots of poets hosting a giveaway on their sites, and of course I'm giving away two books to the winner of a drawing here. You can find lots of links on Kelli's site, and there's still time in April to launch your own!

My friend David Israel has a charming verse up on his blog this morning. Maybe you can use a line from it as a prompt for today.

Poetry prompts for today + E.E. cummings

2011-04-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

The Writing Site has a good list of poetry-writing prompts for children at different grade levels. If you're teaching this April and want to include a section on poetry, this article might be useful. I'm all for kids getting into poetry early. I did, with Dylan Thomas, the Japanese haiku poets, and even Wallace Stevens (couldn't make head or tail out of the poems but I loved the sounds the words made and some of the stranger words).

Speaking of early impressions, this E.E. Cummings poem

made its mark on me when I was an early teen. The fresh use of words and syntax opened my eyes to new possibilities.

The photo exercise is another prompt. Select a photo and write a poem from it. I wrote one, am going to try another this week.

The Alchemist's Kitchen

2011-04-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Susan Rich's fine poetry collection, The Alchemist's Kitchen. My review is up in the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This is a delicious book (kitchen pun intended), brewing up travel, transformation, and mind-watering meditations on a range of subjects. Hope you like the review -- better yet, get the book.

Memoirs of a Rocket Kid & Fathers

2011-04-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

Thinking about my father today, so I thought I'd post an excerpt from my memoir Rocket Lessons about growing up as a Rocket Kid.

Like the men who built the railroads, Dad was an adventurer. In space, what mattered was audacity, not polish. Manners were not part of the calculation set. But my father was not even as calm as other rocket engineers. He was blessed with a thundering voice and a quirky nervous system that did not permit him to sit down for more than half an hour, unless he was too depressed to get out of bed. His Depression-era childhood made him imagine he fit into working class San Pedro. He saw himself as similar to the Europeans who had come here in the 1900s to create what you could call a fish rush. But Dad was nothing like the slow-moving Slavs and Italians. Dad's voice preceded him by two rooms' length and he never stopped talking. He prided himself on being in the elite vanguard. He had received his top secret clearance, shaken Louis Dunn's hand and met Werner von Braun. The Russians were launching missiles that could put nuclear bombs in our back yards, and that gave everyone at STL a permanent headache. No wonder Dad's twitch was getting worse.

We had no idea how high the stakes were. No one yet envisioned men on the moon and satellite-deflected communication. We used rotary dial phones with cords. If you had to call France, you sent a telegram. There were three channels on our black and white television, and none came from farther than the transmission towers in Baldwin Hills. All we knew was that Dad was strung tighter than piano wire. When he came home from Florida he reverberated like the top-hat in a drum set.

"Dolph's got my ass in a sling. Ga-dam bean counters wouldn't reimburse me for the raincoat I lost. Next expense report, I'll say, okay, you sons-a-bitches, go ahead and cross off the raincoat – if you can find it. It's in there. Only it ain't called 'raincoat.' Geezacrist, if we don't get this payload into orbit, I can move to Rosarita Beach and fish all day."

He jumped up and wandered around the living room, inspecting the furniture as if to find fault. My mother smoothed her apron and rubbed her lips together to spread lipstick the way she did when guests arrived, but she did not have lipstick on. Dad repeated gleefully, "Move to Rosarita! Fish all day!"

She emptied the ashtray into the bowl of discarded peanut shells and took it to the kitchen, looking like she wanted to go on out the back door and never return. But she did come back to put the ashtray on the table. Her eyes seemed to have lost color. Dad's job was taking a toll on all of us. A different father came home from every trip. His gaze seemed more pointed, his hair shorter and twitch worse, his searchlight of criticism sweeping the room.

"Let's see that report card," he demanded of me one night. The martini glass was empty. We heard the clang of pot lids, Mom at the frenetic stage of making dinner. I ran to my room, got it and proudly handed it over. He scrutinized my straight A's. Raising his chin, he peered down at me as if he expected one of the A's to wiggle around and become an F.

"Aha, aha … okay. Okay, good." He gave me a look. "Now don't rest on your laurels."

I was in second grade. I just stared.

After the next launch, his face was the color of his cigarette ash. Settled on the couch, he slurped his drink in silence, spitting olive pits into the dish and often missing.

#

Here's a great poem about a father by Theodore Roethke:

MY PAPA’S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Big Poetry Book Giveaway

2011-04-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

I'm participating in the wonderful Poetry Month event Kelli Russell Agodon is organizing, the Big Poetry Book Giveaway. I'm offering my own book, Femme au chapeau, and also Dorianne Laux's What We Carry, a book I think essential to any poetry library.

To enter my giveaway, leave a comment here and be sure to include your email address. I'll print out your names and fish the two winners out of a bowl on May 1, then let you know who the winners are and ship the books!
If you want to participate with your own giveaway blog, check out Kelli's page.

Details, details

2011-04-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Ted Kooser in Poetry Home Repair Manual on the value of details in a poem:

It's the details that make experiences unique and compelling. It s watching one particular old woman in a cardigan sweater burn wallpaper in a barrel, pushing it down and down with a crowbar.

Finely detailed writing won't make it a poem, but it will bring the reader into the scene, whatever scene you're setting, so that you can perform whatever magic poetry can effect within the scene.

First drafts are not yet poems

2011-04-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

I was stunned to look at Elizabeth Bishop's early draft of her famous villanelle, "One Art." It was such a shapeless mess that had I penned it, I would have thrown it away not long afterward as being hopeless. Yet Bishop was one of the most dogged revisers the art of poetry has ever known. She claimed to have taken 20 years to revise "The Moose." This article gives a peek at her 17 extant drafts of "One Art."

April - National Poetry Month in the U.S.

2011-04-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

It's become a tradition to join the April Poetry Month Poem-A-Day challenge. I've done it for several years. This year, I plan to revise a poem a day. The last thing I need is more unfinished drafts. If you want to generate new work, here are a few sites offering ways to celebrate:

Poets.org - 30 Ways to Celebrate
For Teachers
The Official NaPoWriMo site -- the biggest and most comprehensive, listing 280 related sites
Poetic Asides hosting NaPoWriMo
The Gazebo at the Alsop Review - hosting NaPoWriMo

I plan to blog every day a little something to help -- a prompt, a site, a thought. Happy writing and reading! (Don't forget the reading.)

Places That Verb Your World - Around the World

2011-03-31T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to be a pin on the literary map of one of the more exciting journals online, Fringe. Here's my Mt. Diablo pin-drop verse. Just scroll down on the left side of the world map to read my lines.

Fringe is always coming up with interesting ideas, genres, and literary work. Disclaimer: I do interviews for Fringe. Still, I'm entitled to my opinion, and it's that you should check out Fringe. Their Maps issue is fun and their blog is full of surprises and delights.

In other news, I've been at work on my novel, which means a delightful mental sojourn in Northern Italy. Today I've been visiting the Hermitage in Assisi, where Saint Francis lived and preached to the birds. How lucky to get to take breaks in Italy! I'll have to set my next book somewhere fun. Maybe southern Italy! A little research will be required, however.

Double rainbow

2011-03-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

In the po-biz, some days you get the lowering clouds and some days, the double rainbow. The trick is to keep sending them out, no matter how discouraging it can be. I've been circulating a manuscript for over two years now, and as it goes out, it evolves, especially if an editor made comments in the process of rejecting it.

Yesterday I went walking after the storm had abated in the early evening, to find myself arched by an enormous, perfectly formed and brilliant double rainbow. I thought of the way one or two acceptances after a long, difficult season of submitting, can restore your faith in your own writing. That faith (and the concomitant persistence) is the key to improving your work. Nice to get such a picturesque reminder!

Acceptance and Rejection - The Coin

2011-03-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

The two-sided coin buys you into the game of publishing, but really it's more like a 17-sided coin, with only one reverse: 17 turn-downs for every acceptance.

With that as my best average, I'm pleased to have had my poem "The Pearl" accepted recently by Indiana University Northwest's Spirits magazine, for their Spring 2011 issue.

And for that lovely news, I paid with the usual 17 rejection notes, some of them very pleasing for a rejection letter. Some were "please try again" letters, some let me know which poem they liked best. I always appreciate a little feedback on a rejection, as it makes me feel they really considered the work, and it made it to an editor with some decision-making power, not just the first round of (student) readers.

New poetry presses - non-contest + Bly/Rumi reading

2011-03-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

Find new non-contest poetry presses to submit your manuscript to! Several new entries on my page of poetry book publishers that read outside of contests. It seems as though more presses are accepting unsolicited submissions, though some charge a reading fee. But I think the tide of all-contest-poetry-publishing may be turning back to a more diverse way of finding new books and supporting presses. I don't mind a reading fee, especially if you're promised some feedback (Kore Press does this), and even if not, as long as my fee supports a press that publishes work I admire. And if it doesn't, I should ask myself why I'm submitting there!

A hilarious Robert Bly reading of Rumi on praise and catastrophe. (Thanks, Marian Haddad, for the link.)

For a bit gentler Rumi reading, here's Coleman Barks and music, with a poem, appropriately right now, that takes water as a theme.

Get well soon, Coleman Barks!

A Thousand Cranes for Japan

2011-03-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

It's hard not to get whiplash this week, switching between disasters in Japan and the revolution in Libya. My heart still sends up many prayers to suffering Japan. Japan has a tradition of making paper cranes for luck, a tradition that found its way into one of my poems. Here's to recovery in Japan:

At the Thousand Cranes Auto Repair

The women were making and the men waiting
in the room provided. Folding a square piece of gold,
the Japanese woman looked up from behind
her sunglasses and said: A thousand paper cranes.
For a party. For luck. The men’s eyes
fuzzed and snapped: NO TALKING to strangers
during auto repair. A woman with a fan of years
on her forehead moved across the space
to sit beside the folder, pleating the room.
Another question launched the tale
of the last thousand cranes, made at a dying
grandmother’s bedside. (Hers? Mine?
This woman might appear someday at your bed—
for luck, she would say) Everyone was listening
openly now. Their necks leaned in parallel.
Feet dropping down, they flew on story currents
and watched being after being take shape
and rise from luck-bending, blind invention’s
darting, dark skinned fingers.

-- Rachel Dacus
(originally published in Stirring)

Ghost Hours

2011-03-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

Ghost Hours

1. Spring Forward
The government’s at it again, tampering time.
We stagger behind, wishing Salvador Dali minutes
would lag instead of leap. April, the month of taxes
and poetry, trails us like an urchin, asking for thanks
while we are thanked by the government
with jet-lag and loss of easeful dark.
Do you really expect us to pump
the big-top minutes in this shell game
with lifespan, this unsought forward-swap?
And where do the authorities keep
my acrobat hour? My purse’s emptiness
holds shadows and stars.

2. Stashed
Perhaps Congress has stashed the saved time
in a teak box inlaid with mother-of-pearl roses
and lined in dawn-like blue satin.
Or perhaps they use a big penny jar
shaped like a trumpeting elephant.
The lock in his triumphant, raised trunk.
Too many of us must have keys,
for every fall we find it looted
like the empty bank I once saw hung with a For Sale sign.
The silver-hinged vault lay open
for deposits of dust. Ghost hours
must have danced in that mouth at midnight.
I won’t put my overtime
in anything so mawed
or keep my memories under its picked lock.

3. Fall Back
When skeletons dance
and red devil leaves seesaw,
the clock spins backwards. Spring
forward, fall back, I repeat to timepieces
whose hands I wring.
The powers-that-save have conjured
the phantom hour. It imps my night, keeps
afternoons whirring like hummingbirds.
I see now why we must hoard every spark
of light against night’s snip-end and hold life
by the tail – the dark dot
of the question mark.

-- first appeared in The Atlanta Review

Starting the day literary

2011-03-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who closets herself in her study for two hours each morning before work in order to write. I don't ask her what "writing" includes. Does it mean dreaming as she looks out the window at the deer grazing in her yard, or preparing batches of poems to submit, or writing a book review, or shuffling through the pages of a file labeled "Poems in Progress," or lying back on the couch sinking into that state between dreaming and creating? For me, "writing time" includes all those things, and ever since I heard that my friend rose early in order to carve this silent, solitary space out of her busy day, I have tried to start my day in the dreamspace of creativity and even the po-biz parts of it that are necessarily attached to being a published writer.

When I tell friends that my grant writing goes better if I've worked first on a poem, they always laugh, as though poems and proposals were separate planets in the solar system of the mind. Of course, for me, writing can even include brisk walking, or taking a long shower, or reading. It's a state of mind and time. And of course it also occurs in the pockets of the rest of the day, the slack tide moments when your mind doesn't have to focus on much (while washing dishes, for example), and you can return to that poetic problem you've been chewing on.

In case your writing time includes po-biz, here's a handy list of March contest deadlines: http://www.madpoetry.org/contests/march.html

Have a creative day!

Every Morning

2011-02-25T19:12:00.000-08:00

Because it's that kind of day ...

Every Morning I Try

to pronounce a divine name perfectly, knowing
I can’t really say its swallow-swing
or enunciate the syllables a mockingbird
loops in medleys, can’t whisper vowels

of an airplane’s rhyming trail.
Names like that must be repeated
as a flower lets pollen fly. I should mimic
the closed bud’s wise pause.

My human mouth can hardly shape
the million-zinnia alpha letter, let alone
the final plosive dazzle –
but I can hum the consonants
of this green-button day –

and add several bandaged overtones
to the morning-setting moon,
echo two doves speaking
to my dog, who rolls and rolls
on the name’s final Ah.
Since I cannot make that pure sound,

I will get down on the grass and roll with him,
then give the next being I meet
a courteous consonant
dangling an ocean vowel.

First appeared in The Cortland Review

Twice As Much

2011-02-23T10:23:00.000-08:00

I woke up feeling that today will allow a great deal of creative thought -- thanks to some mysterious force, the laws of which we haven't yet discovered. This poem, which originally appeared in Eclectic Journal, is my ode to those unknown, expansive forces.

Twice As Much Starlight

The universe, say surprised astronomers, has twice as much accumulated starlight as can be explained by all the known stars and galaxies. -- Newspaper article, 1998.

This can only mean
a hidden conflagration
burns in the cosmic whirl.
Where can it live, this occult fire --
not at the center
galaxies are escaping.
Not at the frontiers of space
where new suns are pioneered.
So where does the pure pulse
of light beat,
how does it race out of nowhere,
like a night light
the void itself switches on?
Leave it to science to find evidence
that deep in the spin
of atoms is a tiny sun, a heart
of radiance. Let the measuring mind
find the measureless through theoretical
mathematics, I only know
I have lived through days
when there is twice as much love
as people around me to explain it.

The inevitable process

2011-02-17T08:12:00.000-08:00

We've had two family members with dementia, possibly Alzheimer's, in the last few years. My father died a year and a half ago from it, and his wife now has it. Having been appointed her conservator, I feel as if I've now acquired a new, ninety-year-old child. Her well-being is my responsibility. While she dazes off into the eternal present, I pay bills and handle legal matters, locate doctors and confer with geriatric specialists. Thank God my brother is co-conservator and can share all this! I wrote a lot of poems about my father's condition and how it was to lose him inch by inch. This morning, I'm thoughtful about losing her the same way. Here's one of the poems that made me change my attitude toward the whole adventure. (Included in the wonderful anthology Beyond Forgetting):

At the Easel with Alzheimer's

My father is painting in the basement: blue,
green, yellow. The cinderblock wall’s white-
wash is tanned with dust and the ocean view
obscured by a flapping sheet of vinyl. It fights

the wind. He says he's inspired to blue. My phone call
came to his studio and I was greeted: I know you.
You’re the pharmacist, right? The pall
on his memory has not dimmed his bad taste

in jokes or how at the easel he’s always affable
over the scribble of boar’s bristle, the give
of canvas to brush. I skip over laughable
lapses, as when he asks me where I live

and then pretends he was kidding. Name-
dropping, his mind grows patches, nicks
and spores like the salt on his aluminum
windows that will eventually make them stick.

Painting down there, his panes always closed
to keep it warm and dry, not a hint of sea
outside. What are you working on? His nose
nearly on the canvas, he can only say,

It’s getting better, going somewhere. It’s green,
blue, and not as grim as it sounds. His brain
grows lacy and colors squirm like the skeins
of yarn above the basement washing machine.

I’m frightened of how much he forgets,
this new breeze that unzips our history,
but I say, Don’t fight the wind. Be a net.
Catch the world by letting the knots slip.

Best of the Web nomination

2011-02-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

These are the moments when I truly begin to wonder about my memory, but actually I think if I did get an email about this, my spam filter ate it. Because I'd remember THIS! My poem "Mesmer" was nominated by that marvelous zine, Pirene's Fountain, for Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books). Thanks, editor Ami Kaye, and others on the Pirene's team. I'm just delighted. And my apologies for not thanking you sooner! Here's the poem:

Mesmer

Rain can be like Chopin, all piano strings
and syncopated pauses, geometry
of blings under wheels and rubber heels.
Sudden baptism from branches.
Drooled harmonies. On your neck, wet
strings slithering like kisses. Rings
around drops that plop into pools: ting,
ting, ting, ting. Scriabin zithering
loss up your edges, a soul-cling,
foreboding’s cold feathering.

This and That

2011-02-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

Got the new issue of Off the Coast, with my poem "Anniversary" in it. Nice to see the poetry of some friends in the same issue. Good-looking journal! I'm pleased to have work in it.

In other po-news, Soundzine is now reading for its next issue. It 's a print-and-sound zine, with readings of all the poems by the poets.

Why Rocket Kids?

2011-01-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

A long, long time ago, in a life that now seems faraway, my agent suggested I start a blog to help promote the memoir we hoped to soon sell, my book Rocket Lessons. In that book, I wrote about growing up as the daughter of a bipolar rocket scientist in the Cold War era (think Dr. Strangelove).

Things have a way of evolving, and my writing evolved more in the direction of poetry than prose, with an intervening poetry collection, Femme au chapeau, absorbing more of my promotional space and time continuum than Rocket Lessons, which my agent and I finally agreed would make a great SECOND book. Problem now: write my FIRST book.

In the intervening six years I did write that first book. Turns out it has nothing to do with rockets or kids. And now I'm stuck with this lousy blog title. Or maybe great blog title, for someone else.

But I like the implication of zooming, and in the spirit of the original title, here's an excerpt (actually an outtake) from what I hope to be my second book, a little piece about a lovely little spot in San Pedro, my oceanside hometown in southern California.

The Lifeguard's Museum

Natural beauty was not one of the reasons my mother loved to spend a summer day on Cabrillo Beach. It was simply a good place to park your children. We ran pleasantly and safely amok in a crowd of kids on the small triangle of warm sand between the pier and the breakwater. Cabrillo Beach was a tiny San-Pedrans-only place that was so safe it was not long before my mother let Davey and me go there by ourselves. She was reassured by the surveillance of friendly but stern lifeguards under the direction of John Olguin, captain of lifeguards. With a fatherly smile as unvarying as summer sun, John made the beach friendly and safe, so that our parents did not have to watch us too much. He showed us how to respect, but not fear the ocean. John was a San Pedro legend because he had once swum the twenty-six mile Catalina Island Channel. These days, everyone thought of John just as the nicest guy anyone had ever met. You knew if you got into trouble in the water that John's boys would pull you out.

One day, John had had the idea of a marine museum and set up a couple of tables in the long deserted Beach Bathhouse. The gracious old Mediterranean style Bathhouse, with its red tile roof, thick adobe walls and red tile floor had been built in the 1930's at the end of the streetcar line that ferried beachgoers to San Pedro. The building was now gathering dust and sand. John, the official for the facility, had a key. No one objected when he took over the Bathhouse to create a marine museum, though a few people shook their heads and smiled. He swept out the sand, hung photographs of the largest fish ever caught at Norm's Landing, gathered skeletons of large tuna and arranged table-top exhibits of tide pool habitat. He put up a sign advertising free admission and -- Voila! -- a museum, San Pedro style – that is, fast and economical. With the right entrance fee, it quickly acquired an audience of children.

Mom drove me and Val and Davey to Cabrillo Beach almost every day of the summer. Davey was allowed to accompany us because he was willing to carry our towels and the bag of soft drinks. When sun-bathing became unbearable and the squawk of gulls tiresome, the three of us often traipsed uphill to wander through the museum. I was especially drawn to the display of sand dollars, those furry cookies that house teethed creatures that eat seaweed and bury themselves in the sand. The sand dollar, I learned, walks along the ocean bottom on tube feet. The babies have no feet when born, so they swim. This and other arcane ocean lore kept me coming back, and there were always new displays. One day, John hung on the wall a photo of himself wrestling in the surf with something long and feathery. It was labeled a sea-serpent. People whispered and winked, but they ran the photo in the San Pedro News Pilot on the front page. In the blurry snapshot it is hard to see the thing in the surf. It could be a sea serpent. In the museum, I found that scientific names are Latin, like the prayers in Sheila's church. The museum provided amazing discoveries: for example, that an octopus can walk out of the water and go hunting; that jellyfish have no eyes, ears or brain. In the quiet, sandy rooms, my flirtation with nature heated up.

New poetry presses - non-contest

2011-01-16T13:32:00.000-08:00

I found a couple of small publishers that consider poetry manuscripts (or queries about manuscripts) outside of contests. Take a look at my page: Non-Contest Poetry Book Publishers. Please let me know if you know of others. I'd like to make this as comprehensive a resource as possible.

Hope your 2011 is starting off poetically!

Journals that focus on poetry of the spirit

2011-01-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to have had my poems recently appear in these journals with a focus on poetry with a spiritual theme:

Pilgrimage
Now under the editorship of Maria Melendez, this print journal describes itself as "a small magazine living the big questions; a community-in-print serving an eclectic fellowship of readers, writers, artists, naturalists, contemplatives, activists, seekers, adventurers, and other kindred spirits." I like their emphasis on the natural world.

Ruminate Magazine
An attractive print journal that looks for poetry and prose pieces that "resonate with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith ... literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work accounting for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith"

And I've had work in past issues of the gorgeous print journal Image:
Image Journal
"Art, faith, mystery." Their inclusion of full-color art work and articles on the visual arts makes this journal an appealing read.

So far, I've never made it into the pages of these magazines, but they're interesting spiritually-oriented journals:

Tiferet

Ruah/The Power of Poetry

Of course, many American literary magazines include poems with spiritual themes, but there seem to be few that focus on spirituality. Kind of surprising in a country that has been described as one of the countries with the most people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual.

Any additions to this list? Maybe there's an opportunity here to start something new.

Poetry Presses on My Non-Contest List & Bloghops

2011-01-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

My list of poetry publishers who read outside of contests has just grown, thanks to editor/publisher Adam Deutsch and his eagle eye (Cooper Dillon Books). I added:

Black Ocean Press
Four Way Books
H_NGM_N
Octopus Books
Steel Toe Books

Carolina Wren has closed poetry submissions and now reads only prose outside of contests.

Slowly recovering my blogroll. Today I added back Mary Biddinger's blog the word cage. I enjoy her images as well as her words.

Send me your blog! I can't remember everyone's blog, and Blogrolling.com left no forwarding address.

Roundup of my year in poetry

2010-12-31T14:22:00.000-08:00

I don't normally do the brag thing on this blog, at least not too much. But when I thought back on my 2010 in poetry and prose, I wanted to make a list just for my own aide-memoir. It surprised me. I didn't remember doing all this until I started the list. All in all, a good literary year. Here's the list:

Took two poetry workshops with Kim Addonizio

Published eight poems in literary journals (print and online)

Attended Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference in Denver, made new friends, and met many poet friends from online workshops, listservs, and Facebook

Gave three poetry readings in Colorado

Appeared on M.D. Friedman's poetry television show (see my website www.dacushome.com for a clip)

Had my poem "Designer" read aloud by Nic Sebastian on Whale Sound

Had my recording of my poem "Every Morning I Try" published in The Cortland Review

Placed as a semi-finalist in the Akron Poetry Prize contest with my manuscript Gods of Water and Air

Finished the first draft of a novel about a group of college teachers touring the Renaissance sites in Northern Italy and finding romance, marital mishaps, and new life directions as they travel

So here's my short list of resolutions for 2011:

Take another poetry course or workshop or conference
Succeed in getting a book under contract by the end of the year
Give more readings
Go to more readings
Finish editing my novel
Become a better poet

Good books to read over the holidays

2010-12-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

So many blogs and websites (not to mention booksellers) are offering gift-giving book ideas that I thought I'd offer an alternative: good stuff to dig into for a break to soothe your ruffled holiday feathers. This time of year is hectic, even under the best of circumstances. Diving into a good book of poetry or fiction can be a good way to cope.

Some ideas -- gift yourself!

Tinkers -- I found this novel fascinating in the way it documents a dying man's last days in kaleidoscopic splinters of memory and love. Sounds dismal, but it's really not. I found it uplifting and beautifully written, though it did jump around a little more than I liked.

A Summer of Hummingbirds -- fascinating story of the intertwining lives of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and the painter Martin Johnson Heade.

Kay Ryan's The Best of It -- She'll make you laugh with those wonderful twists, and yet it's not exactly light verse. More de-light verse.

Juliana Baggott's novels and blog -- I just discovered her and plan to delve into her novel Which Brings Me To You.

An American Childhood -- Annie Dillard's radiant memoir is one of my must-rereads, along with an annual excursion into Jane Austen.

Emma -- Rereading Jane Austen is a perennial pleasure for me. Maybe you too? And if you haven't read her, I think this is the Austen to start with. Pride and Prejudice of course gets voted the classic, but I found this funnier and more profound.

Femme au chapeau (disclaimer -- it's MY book of poetry!) Okay, I'll even quote from a blurb on the Amazon page: "If Femme au chapeau were music, it would be a piano sonata: humming sonics and graceful rhymes, use of form that is technically supple without sacrificing emotional heartbeat" - Cheryl Snell

Have a tranquil reading break or two during the holidays! (And for those of you who object to Amazon, apologies for not linking to Powell's, where you can find all of these titles.)

Bloghopping for the Holidays

2010-12-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

I intend to spend as much of the holiday season as I can reading, and that includes bloghopping around among the amusing, informative, intimate, surprising, and sometimes hilarious posts of my fellow literary bloggers.

Just in a few minutes of bloghopping via my blogroll and those of the blogs I link to, I found these great resources and blogs:

Mira's List (includes funding for writers and artists)

How a Poem Happens

Kristy Bowen

Poetry Publishers Who Accept Email Submissions

I'm slowly, slowly reconstructing my blogroll, lost when Blogrolling.com ceased operations without warning. Maybe I should take it as a hint from the universe that it's good to clean house sometimes, throw out the old stuff, and start as if you've never before done this. Becoming a novice over and over is an art in itself: cleaning the house of the mind.

Let me know if you have a blog you'd to swap blog links with me!

Revision has begun

2010-12-14T00:29:00.000-08:00

I did it! I finished the first draft of my 265-page novel, took a breath, had some excellent champagne, and the next day, began revising. It took a year to draft it; it will take that long to revise it, probably. Naturally, I don't want to embark on this journey without companions. Here are some friendly advisers I've found to hold my hand and brave the adventure by my side:

How to Revise a Novel (Holly Lisle)

Some Thoughts on Revising A Novel

Revision Checklist (Nathan Bransford)

Finish Your Novel in Four Simple Steps

These are just so I'll remember where I put them. But if you have a big stack of printed paper you'd like to mess around with, you might find these links useful too.

Voice Alpha - "the poem ultimately belongs to the reader"

2010-12-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to have my guest post appear at Voice Alpha, an exciting new blog that's "a repository for thoughts, theories, suggestions, likes and dislikes and anything else related to the art and science of reading poetry aloud for an audience." My blog entry went live today. Thanks, Nic Sebastian, for inviting me to write on this topic. I'll be continuing to read, and also listening and reading on the companion site, Whale Sound, to poems and interviews. The Internet and its visual and audio capabilities is making this an exciting time to be a poet! I do still love print, but I have to prefer hearing a poem to reading one on the page. Maybe it's just me, but the voice is powerful, and sound is an important dimension in a poem.

Google Bookstore

2010-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

It has arrived, and it will let me read e-Books bought there on my iPhone, laptop, desktop, or any device -- best of all, my new book is stored in the cloud! I can access it anywhere.

Check it out: Google Bookstore.

Also best of all (can I have two "bests? -- I think this warrants it), Google Bookstore carries Powell's Books and other Indie Bookstores. That means, "Hello, small press industry, come on into the e-Bookstore!" Some are of the opinion that this will not only increase the market for small press books, but the market for books in general, as titles will now come up on Google searches.

Life in poetry just might get a lot more interesting.

For centuries, until the Renaissance, pretty much all art was commissioned by religious authorities. Churches, temples, mosques, paid artists and musicians and poets to celebrate and illustrate their particular faith. Now things have pretty much reversed, and most art is produced outside of the religious context.

Yet a healthy percentage of contemporary American poetry is based on spiritual feelings, if not overly religious ones. However, the market devoted specifically to publishing spiritual poetry is minuscule. It's much more common to see poems with spiritual undertones in academic and independent literary journals than the few journals that are focused on spiritual art.

Because I'm interested in writing and reading spiritually-based poetry, I've looked into the few litmags that focus on this subject matter. While I don't think a literary magazine should restrict itself in terms of subject matter, I think these few (and any others you can suggest) have come into being because this subject matter has been often excluded from the generality of literary publishing. Here are a few magazines that focus on contemporary spiritual poetry:

Image

Ruminate

Pilgrimage

Tiferet

And for online anthologies of spiritual poetry from all ages:

Poet Seers

Poetry Chaikhana

Undoubtedly, there are more that I don't know about. Suggestions are welcome! Maybe I'll start a page on my website if I get enough listings. But hopefully the mainstream literary journals will increasingly include overtly spiritual poetry. It does seem to be tending in that direction.

My poem read at Whale Sound

2010-11-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy to have Nic Sebastian's lovely reading of my poem "Designer" up today at Whale Sound, a marvelous site of poem readings. Thanks, Nic, and Amy MacLennan, who submitted it!

If you haven't yet discovered Whale Sounds, you're in for a treat. Poems are made to spin out on the air, like birdsong, not just sit in hieroglyphics on a page. At least, that's my thought. Whale Sound's readings are a pure pleasure, in large part because of the beautiful way Nic reads. A good reader of poetry is a treasure, and too few poets cultivate the ability to read aloud as well as write.

Thanks for Whale Sound! And including my poem in it.

Yes, we are Google's #1 listing when googling "Rocket Kids"

2010-11-26T19:39:00.001-08:00

Just sayin ... for awhile we'd slipped to Number 2, right behind the toy website.

Some good poems for your holiday weekend

2010-11-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Lesley Wheeler at Fringe Magazine

Barbara Crooker at Valparaiso Poetry Review

David Citino at Cortland Review

Andrew Hudgins at Poetry

Mary Oliver at Wisdomportal.com

Kelli Agodon's new book + bloghopping Pushcart nominated poems

2010-11-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

I had a preview of Kelli Russell Agodon's Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room by Kelli Russell Agodon before it was published, thanks to a manuscript swap, and I'm delighted to see it out, and sporting a stunning cover. Kelli's playful way of musing on life, relationship, art, and self through engagement with words, right down to their component letters, is highly original. The poems have a breezy, dancing quality that evokes the more buoyant moments in Dickinson, justifying the title. The word "letters" is apt for this book, as its attention to the letters, sounds, and layered meanings of words form a vital subject matter here. A great read, and a thought-provoking collection. (And Kelli's comments on my manuscript were very helpful!)

It's that time of year: no, not the holidays, but Pushcart nominations. Redactions has a nice lineup of nominated poems to enjoy. Able Muse also has posted their Pushcart-nominated poems for this year, a nice read. If more online magazines nominated and posted the poems in an easy-to-read list of links, we could enjoy editors' picks of the best of their zines for the year. Many zines list the poems a year later, but with no links to read the works. As so few nominated poems actually get the prizes, it would give those poems another boost of publicity, a nice thing to do for the poets.

Favorite poems

2010-11-19T09:17:00.000-08:00

Sherry O'Keefe shared a wonderful Frank O'Hara poem on Facebook as one of her favorites.

It tickled me so much to read a terrific poem on Facebook, where even poet usually share music videos and political articles, that it made me wonder about starting a series here, asking you for links to your favorite poems.

Here's one of mine, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, "The Round." It includes his reading and introductory remarks. Sadly, the print Atlantic Monthly no longer publishes poetry. And I no longer subscribe.

What's a favorite poem of yours? Add a comment or email me and I'll post it here. Could be an interesting list.

Listening to poetry

2010-11-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

"Spoken Word" has come to mean slam poetry, or rap, which are in themselves interesting new literary forms

-- though I don't know if I put them in the same category as poetry readings, and I much prefer the quieter way of reading and writing.

Listening to poems has become for me a very stimulating part of my writing practice. So I'm pleased to find audio poetry spreading rapidly throughout the Internet. Poets.org, The Cortland Review, quarrtsiluni, and recently Nic Sebastian's new Whale Sound are sites I've enjoyed listening to. Whale Sound does a twist on the poem-read-aloud: it includes poets reading the work of other poets. This is a practice my local poetry group has tried, and it's a revelation to hear your own work -- or someone else's -- read in a different way than the author might read it.

Reading and Bloghopping

2010-11-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

Reading C.K. Williams luminous book On Whitman. Few seem to get the spirituality of Whitman, the layered use of the first person, stretching from the earthly to the divine, but Williams does. Of course, his own work has a layered, luminously spiritual quality that balances, as Whitman's does, the divine with the quotidian.

Also reading the fascinating and poetic novel Tinkers, and wondering how someone got a first novel so short published. It's only 191 pages. Excellence in the writing, I suppose, is the answer, though I'm skeptical that New York editors these days would even notice that dimension in a book. Color me jaundiced by my own adventures with agents and publishers and efforts to get a book accepted.

One of the pleasures of "friending" writers and poets on Facebook is discovering and connecting to their blogs, for fascinating reading such as Nic Sebastien's Very Like a Whale and Diane Lockward's Blogalicious. Ah, too much to read, too little time to read it all!

Autumn (I hate to call it fall)

2010-10-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

TWICE AS MUCH STARLIGHT

The universe, say surprised astronomers, has twice as much accumulated starlight as can be explained by all the known stars and galaxies. -- Newspaper article, 1998.

We have twice as much starlight,
it seems,
as stars to explain it.
This can only mean
a hidden conflagration
burns in the cosmic whirl.
Where can it live, this occult fire --
not at the center
galaxies are escaping.
Not at the frontiers of space
where new suns are being pioneered.
Where does the pure pulse of light beat,
racing out of nowhere,
a night light switched on in the void?
There is evidence that deep in the spin
of atoms is a tiny sun, a heart of radiance.
In the same way,
I have lived through days
when there is twice as much love
as people around me to explain it.

-- first published in Earth Lessons

New Poetry Presses on My Non-Contest List

2010-10-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to tips from Facebook friends, I've updated my list of non-contest poetry presses. Take a look, and send me your suggestions, if you know of a poetry book publisher that reads queries or manuscripts outside of contests:

Non-Contest Poetry Book Publishers

Rainy day, writing day. I'm reading Kim Addonizio's wonderful new book Ordinary Genius, A Guide for the Poet Within.

Here's a little video clip of Kim talking about the book:

Kim - Ordinary Genius

Have a good writing day!

Wine

2010-10-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the change of seasons and the last burst of bloom and color in summer's outgoing. We had a week of warmth around here, last bit of near-naked ease in wearing our clothes loosely and feeling the breeze and sun on skin.

Wine comes in many forms, but it's best imbibed under an old tree, preferably one laden with summer fruits.

Wine Under a Fig Tree

That any tiny winged thing
may explode from you without warning
and after that, a long rearranging of leaves.
That you can’t have too many green hands
to widen the town’s summer evening.
That the wind’s smallest breath
can rock your whole being,
root your grasp on a changeable breeze
that will ever slide over and through you.

A lot to learn from a fig tree’s
small white ovals. How growth
often comes in the shape of tears,
yet the fat stem holds. A lot to glean
from the abundance, even after your leaves
have piled up like shoes gathered on a doorstep.
How your life’s work can be picked, peeled,
and sautéed, can glisten dark and lobed
in someone else’s pan. That you can give
everything and stand bare yet full
of sky. Some things a fig tree has to say
can only be said to the stars.

Interviewing poet Susan Rich

2010-10-12T00:46:00.000-07:00

My interview with Susan Rich, author of The Cartographer's Tongue, Cures Include Travel, and The Alchemist's Kitchen, is up at Fringe Magazine. Susan has received awards from PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement, and Peace Corps Writers. Her fellowships include an Artists Trust Fellowship from Washington State and a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa. She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia Herzegovina, and a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. She lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline Community College. I had the fun of asking her how her travels influenced her writing, and if in her new book travel has been supplanted by a different muse, or remains one of her constant themes and catalysts. Read the results.

A Kick on the Apogee

2010-10-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

Another excerpt from my memoir, Rocket Lessons.

Newton's First Law of Motion: An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Mitch's Corollary: Become an unbalanced force and beat the Reds into space.

Cutting off his finger at the age of twelve must have turned my father into a worrier, but as always, he turned it to good use when he became the project manager for rocket design projects. He worried his way into space with the world’s first functioning telecommunications satellite, though he did nearly set off World War III.

My father was a dazzle and a puzzle to me, from an early age. He is even now, when I am middle-aged and he in his dementia can recall none of his own remarkable history. The worry gene was passed down liberally to me and my brother, who are now bonafide rocket scientists of panic and alarm. He went far as a rocket engineer on Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will,” which speaks to the perceived perversity of the universe. Yet he made this catechism funny, as he twisted us into knots of his paranoid wisdom. By second grade, I not only knew Murphy’s Law, but also many of its corollaries, such as Finagle’s Law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.” Mitch found these laws hilarious, and thought it was hugely entertaining to train us to imagine every possible disaster, then find ways to engineer a course around it. He showed us how to graph and plot, to connive and use subterfuge. He was a font of deception, taught us to box, to shoot down any oncoming snipe with bigger firepower. He taught these things by wounding, maiming, and hobbling us, his neophytes, as he had been wounded, maimed, and hobbled by his father’s caustic tongue.

It seems tragic that my father was so wrong about life. Not everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Not everyone you trust betrays you. Love does exist and can be depended on. He does not know these things, but he is learning to depend on people he has no cause to trust, but who do care for him although he has done little to deserve it. And although dementia is a pretty big hole in your boat, he is oddly the happiest and most content he has ever been, doing without his booby-trap intellect. My rocket scientist father can no longer work a simple telephone.

I do still have a healthy fear of knives. Thanks to Dad, loud noises, anything resembling his explosive shouting, can make my nerves quiver for an hour. I also have an acute organizational ability to wield like a samurai sword at my anxieties. I know we are doomed because my father made me repeat his creed of fear and contemptus mundi, but I have foiled him by falling in love with life and its unpredictability. To spite him, no doubt, I developed in childhood a thirst for God.

Perhaps it was a quest to best my manic, paranoid, competitive parent by aligning myself with a Higher Power. Nothing quite irks an atheistic Jew more than a fervently mystical, Catholic-leaning daughter. From age nine, I craved the Eucharist, mysteries and magic, saints, and oh, yes, reincarnation, ancient Egypt, and eventual satori. Yeah, the Tao too, and haiku. I became an eclectic mystic, a yin-yang of philosophies blending into poetry, with a dash of mythology.

All this roils through my mind tonight as I weep. I just talked to a kindly social worker about placing my father in what they call a “secure unit.” That means you cannot escape, which is Dad’s worst fear. It means others will control his every movement. This makes me grieve for our entire past, the past which until this moment I have been ready to dump hog-tied off the nearest pier. This is a man I have wished dead so often it no longer shocks me. Now I grieve because he will go into a locked ward. He is no flight risk. His vascular issues, which have caused his dementia, are again diminishing him. They lopped off all the toes on his right foot because of poor circulation. My father is again disappearing by digits. Full circle, it would seem. Life is full of paradox. And Murphy has no law for this.

But I get ahead of myself. I should begin at the beginning. Rocket science and I were conceived at about the same time, four years after the A-bomb, the year my parents moved to Buffalo, New York, during one of the coldest winters on record. How I came to be growing up in San Pedro, California with the Vice President of Camping is a simple tale of opposites being attracted. My parents met in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Both were in Navy uniform after World War II. Dad was a brashly funny Russian-Hungarian Jew with a distaste for snobbish society and a taste for shiksas with good legs. My mother, Marybeth, was descended from a line of Episcopalians, Mayflower-proud and socially ambitious. Yet both my parents were classic products of their Depression and World War era, a simple and dutiful world of black and white choices. Mitch, my father, was helping to create our complexly technical world, with its quantum mechanics of decision-making, through his life's glorious passion: shooting things into outer space.

Mitch had been sidelined from overseas duty in the Air Force by a deathly allergy to buckwheat. If not for a pancake, I might not have come to be, as the average lifespan of pilots was much shorter than that of aeronautical engineers. On a routine ferry flight, Mitch began chatting with "a knockout brunette." She was a control tower operator whose amusing idea of efficiency was to give the okay to two planes to take off at the same time from opposite ends of the runway. Marybeth's career in air traffic control was understandably brief, but it didn't matter. She had met the world's most exciting man on that airplane ride. They married as soon as Mom was discharged, and spent their first married year in his fifth-floor walk-up artist's studio. Her momentary doubts before marrying him had been quelled by a conversation with Mitch's Aunt Rivka, who told Marybeth she better get over her cold feet or Mitch might not survive being jilted a second time. Mitch and Marybeth married, at her mother's insistence, under the traditional crossed swords of a military ceremony – a prophetic touch, I always felt.

Soon Mitch grew tired of what he thought was to be his life's passion: painting portraits for picky, eyelash-counting rich people. He decided to capitalize on his chemical engineering degree and Air Force experience to get into this new rocket business. Rockets in those days were Rube Goldberg affairs, gigantic Roman candles put together with electrician's tape and rudimentary aerodynamics. They carried enough explosives to make a good crater. Engineers and scientists were shooting them off with no more than a few slide rule calculations, and as long as they didn't kill anyone on re-entry, everyone was happy. In those days, even rocket science was not exactly rocket science.

Mitch and Marybeth stayed in Buffalo one winter after my birth. Then Mitch was hired by a young Naval Lieutenant Commander, Robert Truax, who was famous as the protégé of Robert Goddard, the dean of American rocketry. Commander Truax asked Dad to manage the new Naval Air Rocket Test Center. Dad bought a house in Whippany and while he and Truax were inventing new and more powerful rockets, my infancy flowered in a farmland being divided up into housing tracts. I had a happy thundercloud-and-buttercup infancy, despite the invasion of a tubby little alien called Danny. My younger brother came one day from a hospital, was plunked into a teeter-totter and was – outrageously – made the center of our attention.

Mitch did well. He blew up one test laboratory and achieved a fuel efficiency so impressive that Dr. Louis Dunn, the head of Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, asked him to come and work in Los Angeles. Because the JPL job didn't start soon enough for him, Dad wound up working instead for Dr. Simon Ramo and his partner Dean Wooldridge. Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation had just been awarded a contract to do the systems engineering and technical direction of the Air Force's new Atlas ballistic missile. Dad had six weeks to pack up and get us to the West Coast. We flew out to join him in a rental house in Inglewood. It didn't take Dad long to find us a new, architect-designed house dramatically poised at the ocean's brink. Miraculously – even in 1955 – the ocean-front house was in our price range. Sale papers were prepared. My parents were ready to sign, but when the pens were poised, the realtor casually mentioned that of course a Jewish family could not expect to be invited to join the area's new country club.

Dad's face had turned five successive colors, from greenish-white to lobster. He choked out a few words, ripped up the sales contract and flung the pieces in the man's face. He then piled us back into the station wagon and drove furiously down the road. We knew better than to ask questions when Dad's head was twitching that hard, jerking back over his shoulder. Within forty minutes of leaving Portuguese Bend, my father had seen a "Houses for Sale" sign in San Pedro, port of Los Angeles and a town of Italian, Serb, Croat, Portuguese, Greek and Mexicans, where there were two canneries and the nation's largest commercial fishing fleet.

"Mom, do we have to go in?" I said, tired of traipsing through model homes.

Mom, fixing her lipstick, looked at me through the rearview mirror. "No, we don't. Your father wants a quick look. He'll be right back. Tomorrow we're going to look at the house in Brentwood again. That's when you'll need to be patient."

But I had to be patient today. We waited a long time. Dad finally came out, waving a piece of paper which he thrust through the open window at Mom.

"We got it!" he shouted.

My mother stared at him, mouth open and lipstick in hand. "What do you mean?"

"The house is ours. I bought it. There were two other couples in there, I had to move fast – why didn't you come in?"

"Mitchell!" she said, then slumped down to lay her head on the back of the seat. She did not say another word all the way back to Inglewood.

So the modern bungalow on Fourth Street became ours while my mother was still fixing her lipstick. We would live within sight of the sea, and near Dad's beloved fishing. I would learn to cross myself before I learned to say the Shma Israel. Through my father's impulsiveness, I was to spend my vaguely Jewish, middle class childhood in a blue collar Catholic town.

Dad's purchase was also an impulse of revenge, rewarded in cinematic, Biblical proportions. Two years later, the hillside shifted. Half the new houses slid into the ocean, along with the brand new, completely non-Jewish country club. Dad always went out of his way to drive past Portuguese Bend.

"Look at that!" he exclaimed, as though we had never before seen the block lettered signs: "Danger! Slide!"

He shook his dark head until the shaking became his twitch. "They've moved the road over again. Twenty more houses are going to go into the sea. Mazel Tov! What kind of crazy people would build here? Look at the cracks in that hill."

"I feel sorry for them, losing their homes," said my mother. "Imagine how you'd feel."

"Thank you, Lady Bountiful. Oh, I'm sorry for them. About as sorry as you can feel for snooty morons. Now they can have their country club parties on the beach, if they don't mind barbecuing up to their keisters in water."

"Mitchell!"

"What? I can say 'keisters' in front of my own children."

"Children should be protected."

"Says you and Dr. Spock. What's the fuss? Raising kids isn't rocket science. Any numbskull can bring up kids."

This stunned my mother, with its deft combination of insult, insensitivity and the implication that she wasn't pulling her weight. The daughter of an Army colonel, a harsh disciplinarian, she was used to being chided as selfish, but she never got used to being called stupid. It was a rankle that oystered her genteel calm, a nit she could not slough off, no matter how many times she changed the subject. She had a great consolation, though, in the form of Southern California's beaches. Every summer day, she took us to Cabrillo Beach to encounter that vast, dark blue expanse that lay around every bend of San Pedro. Holding her hand, I summoned the courage to wade in, keeping in the shade of the pier. At every wave that luffed me up and down in its cold, cradling silk I felt a terror and a thrill. During that first year in San Pedro, I had constant nightmares about the ocean, a panic probably learned from my father. He approached the beach like an enemy, barking instructions to NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN.

Rocket Lessons - Fog: Launch Scrubbed

2010-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

I started this blog at the suggestion of my agent, who thought blogging excerpts from my memoir of growing up as a rocket kid would be a good idea. And yet, thanks to the readers of this blog, it's turned ever more toward poetry and away from prose. Today, I offer the opening of one chapter of Rocket Lessons -- a kind of prose poem.

Fog: Launch Scrubbed
Einstein's Theory of Relativity: Due to the natural curvature of space, the shortest path between any two objects is never a straight line, but a curved line called a geodesic. An example of this is that we can see stars that are located in a straight line behind the sun appearing near the edge of the sun.

Dad's Corollary: Unless there's fog.

I knew before I opened my eyes it would be socked-in, with Foghorn Maggie's groans weaving into my dreams. She sounded like my mother crying in the bathroom, like my father pushing away from the table with what he called a complimentary belch. Maggie groaned like Dad's rockets as they ripped away from the gantry and slowly ascended, a scene we had viewed in black-and-white on our new television. "Oh, Fog," was what I think Dad said when Mom mailed the bank deposit to the phone company – what he had said when the Russians launched Sputnik a year before the Americans were ready to launch.

San Pedro's fog seeped through balding ice plant and effervesced off Bixby Slough, tumbled over docks where men on crates mended fishing nets and tuna boats bobbed red, green and useless. Fog meant bad fishing, sport and commercial. It meant launches scrubbed, Dad coming home with an empty sack. The look in my mother's eyes when he rambled on about some jerk who would not give over when Dad hooked his only fish of the day, a gathering of cloud that meant I was likely to get lost.

Mist slipped behind Mom's eyes and made her hear us from a distance: "What? What?"

My job was to sound the horn when it got too thick, prevent blind collisions in my family, the ramming thud that sickened me in the night remembering its sound in their voices. So far, as a fog horn, I had only managed a few croaks, which were mistaken for insolence and got me sent to ruminate alone on how the fog descended to cut off the tops of the houses across the street, leaving only a sly wink of a window here and there.

She sent us walking to school in fog so thick it dewed my jacket. Houses floated and shifted, unmoored from Bynner Drive. The blank descended only as far as the red, but not the green, stoplight. Palm trees rose into the mist like mastodon legs, suggesting a prehistoric swamp where my school should be. Inside the classroom, time rusted and flaked. All over San Pedro, you could hear children's minds evaporating. Finally the afternoon cannery whistle set us free to race out into drizzle, but I was afraid to venture off my regular route. My own neighborhood blurred and gapped with pockets of blank. I hurried, thinking to outrun it, hurry in case my own house turned up missing. But there it was. I hardly noticed that I slowed when I saw it.

By dinner, the fog burnt off, leaving a cloud scrimshaw on the apricot sky, but night fog roared back and fell like snow. Fog fell indoors, into our TV. Dad pounded the set. "Geezacrist! What did you do to this set, Betts? Did you fiddle with the rabbit ears?"

Noise frothed in the kitchen, and Mom's voice said, "Why would I do that?"

For a moment, the atmosphere cleared. Dad's eyes flared, as they did when a car veered into his lane. Then kitchen noises clattered. Dad went back to fiddling with the antenna, and we all sank back into grayness.

My Reading up on the Poets Coop TV Site

2010-10-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege of being invited to appear on Poets' Co-Op TV show on Channel 54 in Boulder County, Colorado, on September 5. M.D. Friedman, a poet, artist, and musician, hosts this monthly poetry show. He had also invited me to give a reading in his series at the Loveland Museum, which was great fun. It's a lovely venue and a good group of poets regularly attend.

It's interesting to watch yourself reading. I'm taking notes for next time (smile more!). I really appreciate M.D.'s invitation to appear. His work to produce this show, and the professionalism and pleasant presence of his colleagues who do all the camera and sound work is awesome. Support Channel 54 if you're in Boulder County! It's a good station providing good programming.

I wish someone around here (Contra Costa County, CA) would start a poetry TV! Poetry on TV is such a natural.

Poems of place

2010-10-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

Working on a novel set in Italy reminded me of my poem about Venice. I love poems of place, especially Elizabeth Bishop's South America poems.

Wearing Venice

I have taken to wearing Venice
on my wrist. Beads of glass
with foil hearts dangle
from my hand as I jog
around a geometrical landscape
ruled by science and not art.
I have crafted a bracelet of glass
to wear a city water whisks,
echoing through airy loggias,
sloshing on slimed stones,
dazzling the ogee-arched
windows from which Venetians hung
gold flags and corpses.

A world winks on my arm, mysterious
as the eye of a bronze horse.
Green beads click a rosary of longing
for luminous sheets of pink water.
Venice shimmies up my forearm
and a sighing Venetian crosses a bridge.
In summer, when gondoliers pole
black boats through stone canyons,
pushing down on fathoms of muck,
you sink into a spell, surging
around the cloud-colored city
on this wave and that.
Then Venice wears you,
a swinging bauble of glass and light.

Readings in Colorado

2010-09-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is a thank you letter to everyone who kindly came to hear me read in Colorado. I read first at the Loveland Museum, where the open mic portion was unique and fascinating. Then I was on M.D. Friedman's local tv poetry show, The Poet's Co-op TV Show. It was a blast, though I didn't know which camera to look into, but all cameras (and camera operators) looked friendly. If you live in Boulder County, Colorado, you should watch this show regularly. They've had some stellar poets on, people like Lynn Emanuel. I was honored to be in such good company, and really enjoyed the process. When the show is archived on the Poets Co-op website, I'll post an announcement.

And last but surely not least, I read at the fabulous Cannon Mine Poetry Series in Lafayette, hosted by poet and editor Bryan Roth. This series has also had a stellar lineup of featured readers, and has an excellent open-mic following. I was delighted to appear there again, with such a warm welcome, and such an interesting open-mic following my reading, including poets Barbara Ellen Sorensen, whose new chapbook, Song from the Deep Middle Brain, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag and Lew Forester, who read a stunning new poem.

All in all, major fun for a poet. Thanks to everyone named (and not named) for your kind hospitality, great welcome, and sharing your poetry with me!

Reading here, and here, and here ...

2010-09-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

I'm in Colorado, mixing business, pleasure, and poetry readings. The first one I did here was at the Loveland Museum, as part of the Internet Poets Coop Series, run by poet, musician, and artist M.D. Friedman. The evening began with an open mic -- an unusual arrangement, as usually the featured reader is first and open mic second -- which allowed me to hear some Colorado poet voices before giving my reading. It was fun to hear my audience before addressing them, as I don't usually get to do that.

And it's always interesting to hear the poetic context in any reading series. Often reading series that include open mics have followers, regulars who often participate in the open mic and thus know each other's work. There are discernible poetic sub-cultures that grow around groups that meet together regularly. They influence each other as poets. You can hear what the group as a whole encourages and perhaps subtly discourages in their responses.

My next Colorado event will be The Poets Coop TV Show, live on Sunday, September 5 at 7 pm, Boulder County Comcast Channel 54. The video will be archived on The Poets Coop TV Show website and on my website.

And next Thursday, September 9 at 7 pm, I'll be the featured reader at the Cannonmine Poetry Series, at Cannonmine Coffee Company, 210 S. Public Rd., Lafayette, CO. (303) 665-0625.

Wow! I feel handsomely welcomed here in Colorado.

Writing a novel

2010-08-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've heard it likened to creating a quilt the size of a soccer field (Jane Vandenburgh), to cantilevering out a floor built on nothing underneath (Annie Dillard), to a feral beast kept in a room (Dillard again), and perhaps my favorite quote is from Somerset Maugham, who said there are three secrets to writing a novel and no one knows what they are.

All these are true in my current experience of working on a new novel. Set in Italy, it follows a group of thirteen travelers, college instructors, in search of a new life, or a renewed life, by studying and then touring through the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Along the way, through mishaps and misadventures, several of them get a new life, but perhaps not in the way they had planned.

I got the idea to mix in a little magic, a little Midsummer Night's Dream mayhem, and of course a lot of gorgeous Italian settings, which would allow me to grab chunks of a memoir I wrote once about taking such a tour. My life was much less dramatically rearranged than my fictional travelers, following my tour, though it did make an indelible impression.

Now the book follows me around. Yesterday, I was having a glass of wine with some friends when they asked me what I was writing. I sketched out the plot and was asked, "Did the Renaissance come before or after the Middle Ages?" At this point, I was struck with the realization that I really had to explain the Renaissance much better at the outset. I was assuming things about my audience I perhaps shouldn't assume. As I heard myself stumbling through an overly long explanation, I took a giant step back from my big quilt of character, setting, event, and history, and wished I were a much better writer. One who could explain the Renaissance and its impact on Western civilization -- and why America wouldn't exist without it -- in a sentence or two.

Feral beast, I'm thinking today. Throw it some raw meat! Yikes!!

Noise pollution

2010-08-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

I was going to spend an hour this morning before work playing with a poem revision, but the gardening service our condo association has hired has a crew full of men wielding the loudest instruments I've ever heard: edgers, mowers, and blowers. And they have no pattern of work, perhaps finishing our side of the complex all at once, then moving to the next area. First, the edger comes along, with a noise like a table saw that starts up and powers down every few seconds, making me wish I were deaf. A half hour later comes the mower, who goes over and over a tiny patch of balding grass that in the 15 years I've lived here has never thrived, probably because it's never properly thatched. Just as soon as peace descends for another 15 minutes, the blower guy comes by, and he's clearly marking time, making the most elaborate passes back and forth to cram all downed leaves into the edges next to the buildings, where they will absorb moisture and create dry rot.

This, sadly, is not a poem or a poem revision. It is a gentle screed against this rape of the environment, powered by noisy gasoline engines. Before we worry too much about exhaust from cars despoiling the atmosphere, maybe we should consider the fact that one of these crews works on almost every yard once a week. There is no mitigation of the exhaust or the noise. Maybe we need to rethink this whole way of caring for the landscaped environment.

And now, for the 15 minutes of quiet, I will consider my poem.

Femme au chapeau

2010-08-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about ekphrastic poetry again lately, how much I enjoy poems that use paintings as touchstones. I'm a big fan of a wonderful illustrated book by Lynne Knight called Snow Effects after an exhibition called "Impressionists in Winter" that came through San Francisco some years ago. My father was a painter, and I'm sure that watching him gave me ideas about creativity.

This is one of my poems based on paintings, from my book of the same name. I think I need to go to a museum soon. Or visit a friend's studio!

FEMME AU CHAPEAU

– after a painting of his wife by Matisse, 1905

She’s ready to doff tradition’s muff and the cane
on which she stylishly leans. Yeats is about
to write: The bees build in the crevices. Her mane
of red is upswept, but wants out.
Hollowed by chaos, her face is Internet
turquoise and neon pink, cartooned as if
she were a television on which we get
the perennial game show, What’s the Dif?
Miracles of the time are all around her—
the German and his unconscious, Pavlov’s reflex—
a patent examiner with a theory that avers
time’s not absolute. Matisse goes psychedelic
on a woman’s face. Titled Woman, like so
many painters’ wives, she seems not to see
the changes or first she’d remove that chapeau,
and its crushing fruit, its dour antiquity.
Eyes wild as pinwheels whirl questions:
If we can’t escape birth or condition,
what’s the point? If not now, when?
Who will I be, Henri, when I come to fruition?
as a woman all rainbow atomic ignition.

Another Walking Poem

2010-07-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

A Walk After Reading Dante’s Paradiso

We live in a heaven we take great pains to avoid.

Shielding our cheeks from a winter sky’s

chilled fur, we hunch against the brush of air

that has rushed gloriously everywhere. We listen

into our phones so as not to be pierced

by arias in the pines. Clench

worry’s hands to keep a woodpecker’s drumming

from entering our bones. Stay separate.

Refuse to sail a cloud into evening’s gold.

I circle your neighborhood. You switch on your motor

to cancel my hellos and drive by, tunnel-gazing

at the road. You will not allow yourself

to be distracted by a flock of red butterflies

that seem to have settled on the quince. You work

at not seeing the cherry trees’ candlelight parade. Busy

yourself steadying a tea tray on your head.

It’s hard not to look into each other’s eyes,

down wells of the water we daily draw up,

but bliss is trying to leach into our cells

from the sheer forces of nature and humanity.

Happiness can sprout in a moment, absurd

amid the gray towers strafed by centuries.

Don’t make a habit of paving over any space

where a tiny flower could pop or hold

your breath so you can’t nose around

as easily as an old dog finds a neighborly scent

and comes upon another circle of delight.

Morning and walking poems

2010-07-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know if you have daily cycles related to your writing, but I find morning energy combined with the mental palette-cleansing from a good night's sleep lends itself to creative ideas. I've even tried to write about the state I sometimes find myself in during this period, especially if I go walking in the morning.

This one is from my chapbook, Another Circle of Delight, which has a number of walking poems:

As Yearning Is Red

Sudden as a hat is ripped away
by the wind, he was over my head.
Long black legs scissored together
as he plowed the seamless sky
with a beak pointed like a boat’s prow.
The wings rowed lazily.

There’s little reason to look up when I walk,
I passed just as he paused to float on a thermal.
I was heading downhill and he was gliding down
to the creek. We were nearly eye level.
I had a precarious feeling, as if my marching feet
had risen off the ground.

His wings rippled several times
as he held on and I did. They rippled again:
a lace bedspread shaken out.
He was white as yearning
is red, still as night’s first sip of moon.
Then the luminous being was gone,
leaving me ruffled and aired, forever feathered,
able to lift on the beat of a breath.

Walking as writing practice

2010-07-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

Marian Haddad pointed me to a marvelous article, "Solvitur Ambulando," by Carol Keeley on Ploughshares on this topic.

I walk every day, often in the evening or at night, and sometimes twice a day, midday and evening. I walk when I feel anxious, tense, expansive, in need of a break, bored, even tired. I walk in the morning often to glean natural images, not necessarily to write about but just to wonder at. I think sometimes poets are the last people on earth to cherish a sense of wonder and make it their job to do so.

Walking always brings me at least one wonder, whether it's something as predictable as a star or moonrise, or a surprising scene in the street, or a wonderful smile from a complete stranger than alters the way I feel about the world.

I'm happy to learn from this article the long, long list of writers and philosophers who made daily walks part of their meditative practice. I think in the East they sit in caves. In the restless West, many of us walk.

Is the print book dead?

2010-07-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

Anis Shivani has an interesting article in the Huffington Post that argues for the future of the book in print, and literature in general, as lying with the fearless small presses. It's a series and he invites comment from readers as part of what he plans to address in future articles.

What do you think? Which presses should or should not be mentioned as among the top 25? Is the print book dead with the advent of Kindles, iPads, etc.? I love stashing a small book in my purse to take to a field or park and read. Poetry, of course, or small books about it, like Richard Hugo's delightful Triggering Town. But I know devotees of the Kindle et al delight in having thousands of books tucked in pockets and purses. That does sound like fun, but then I'd have to choose. Sometimes the best part is having only that one little book with you, and no computer.

New Interview at Fringe with Poet Eliot Khalil Wilson

2010-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

My interview with the author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go and This Island of Dogs is up at Fringe, in the new summer issue. I had the chance to ask him about how he became interested in poetry, what it’s like writing as a Southerner and an Arab-American, and how MFA programs have improved poetry.

It was a lot of fun to ask him a variety of questions, simple things like "What is poetry's purpose?" He's a witty, knowledgeable, and wonderful poet. Read him. Buy the books, look him up online. He's going to be a big deal. No kidding.

Bloghopping + A Recommendation

2010-06-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Smoking Poet is full of interesting work, including a poem, "Tarnish," by Jim Valvis that I very much like for its simplicity and subtlety. The issue includes a good interview with poet Derek Burleson and reviews of both poetry and prose books. They also have a unique feature "A Good Cause" in which they showcase a charitable project. This warms my fundraiser's heart!

I've had two of my poetry manuscripts edited, the first time I've done this. I'm really glad I did. Not only did it improve the manuscripts (and make me decide to put one on the back burner, needing further work), but it has already improved the responses I typically get from editors on both individual poems and the manuscript as a whole. Economical and well worth it if you consider the cost of contest fees.

Red C Services provides business and literary editing, as well as editing for students. Check it out. If you decide to try an editor, tell Bryan I sent you.

Corium Magazine

2010-06-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to have my poem "Genesis" in the new issue of Corium Magazine, The second issue of this exciting new zine just published today. Corium is the venture of Lauren Becker, Editor-in-Chief, Poetry Editor Heather Fowler, and Associate Editor Greg Gerke. It publishes poetry, fiction, and very short fiction, as well as art work. It's named for the under-layer of the skin, as described in their mission statement:

The corium is the dense inner layer of skin beneath the epidermis, made up of connective tissue, blood and an elaborate sensory nerve network. Corium aims to showcase work that touches on nerves and lingers. That evokes and awakens. That leaves an imprint that sticks around for awhile ...

A good-looking, good read! Take a look, submit.

Best American Poetry?

2010-06-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Anis Shivani, in a review of the Best American Poetry series in The Huffington Post that some might say gives new meaning to the word "scathing," takes on David Lehman's sacred cow series, Best American Poetry, charging that:

"Compile Lehman's increasingly desperate forewords in defense of his precious anthology year to year, and you have the record of the poetry establishment's grotesque self-justification. We do not need to be relevant or exciting or new or accomplished or anything, damn you! It's the reductio ad absurdum of an aesthetic that builds from banal diversity and ends in democratic piffle." This gloves-off indictment of the poetry establishment's darling anthology is worth reading for its challenge to complacency about the state of poetry, especially among those who lament its increasing unpopularity in American culture. Why, some ask, is poetry so marginalized? And at the same time, some of those same critics and poets are working hard to marginalize and obscure what once was an art form that could be enjoyed by anyone reasonably literate and knowledgeable. I agree with Shivani's point that much of what's found in contemporary poetry makes no sense, but passes for art through political correctness or sheer obscurity.

I found this one of Shivani's more interesting points:

" ... the bulk of the academic poetry written today is from a stance of moderate, earnest, entirely boring emotion; there is nothing at all subversive about it."

Boring, that's about the worst thing in writing!

To be sure, The Huffington Post isn't known for moderate viewpoints and editorials. But if only to see a thorough dishing of the BAP series, this article is a must-read.

I Guest on Woman-Stirred Radio

2010-06-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

I was invited to appear on Merry Gangemi's delightful weekly poetry radio show, "Woman-Stirred Radio" during National Poetry Month. A link to the interview is now up at WGDR, Goddard College, which hosts Merry's show. Thanks, Merry! I had a great time talking to you and enjoy following your show.