In the new issue of Calyx is a review by Holly Karapetkova of the anthology Letters to the World: Poems from the WOM-PO Listserv. Naturally, I'm pleased to have my poem, Femme au chapeau, mentioned.
The review remarked on several serendipitous conjunctions that occurred in an anthology compiled democratically, each poet selected her own poems to include, with the poems in alphabetical order by the poet's last name. So it was happenstance that my ekphrastic poem ended up on a page facing Barbara Crooker's ekphrastic poem "All That Is Glorious Around Us." Barbara and I agree that this is a nice coincidence, giving the two poems a stage from which to speak to each other and to their respective paintings in, as the reviewer says, very different ways. Sometimes life likes to make its own poetry.
Blogging in Afghanistan? Yup. I found out on Twitter, naturally, that Nasim Fekrat has helped created an Afghani blogosphere, despite the country's problems. According to the article on Foreign Policy: "On his groundbreaking blog, Afghan Lord, Fekrat hopes to tell that to the world. Writing in Farsi as well as self-taught English, he has taken it upon himself to show Afghanistan's softer, more genuine face. Until recently, he feels, this face was nearly impossible to find."
The world is losing its borders, thanks to the Internet. When I visited with a friend who had spent several years teaching in China, he reported the same thing. The Internet is changing the world. It increasingly works no longer from top-down governments. It's becoming more and more a from-the-bottom-up, democratic surge of younger people making a new global culture.