A stack of poetry books

I just finished A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight by Hadara Bar-Nadav.

Soon, I will turn to one of these:

A Model Year by Gina Myers

Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino.

O City by Wayne Miller

Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina

poem draft

Here's a draft of a poem for the series I'm working on...the series is called Notes for a Memoir...

Gone...

Edip Cansever

What a great poem. Can't wait to read more by him.

pole vaulting skills

HTML Giant has this fantastic entry on moves in contemporary poetry. They're so right on. These are the trends. Sadly, I blindly follow more than half of them while writing. It's probably best to break some of these habits once conscious of them.

Headlines

I finished reviewing Allison Benis White's Self Portrait with Crayon. It will be in H_NGM_N's next issue.

Wrote a decent poem with drop lines the other day.

Audrey will begin crawling any day now. At five and a half months, she smiles at strangers and grabs everything. She would eat pizza, drink wine and coffee, and talk on cell phones if she could.

Danna and I found the BEST baby-carrying contraption. It's called an ERGO (see picture).

My farflung, online writer's group will meet up this summer in late July. I'm pretty excited to meet everyone in person. My vote for location is Baltimore. We'll see.

My pal Phil Estes has a poem up at Frigg.

After six months of drinking dark roast coffees exclusively, I'm giving light roasts a chance.

Plain Spoke

I just got an acceptance from Plain Spoke. The poems I've seen in this journal rock and are close to my aesthetic, so I'm psyched to find out they wanted a poem from my Notes for a Memoir series.

Here's what New Pages has to say about the little journal.

"the world exists nowhere but within us"

I've really enjoyed the prose poem sequence from Rilke in the fall issue of The Paris Review. He wrote it as a 22-year-old...such strong juvenilia attests to his possibly being the best poet of the 20th Century.

I love how this passage moves between the metaphors of engraving a watch or compass (with the verb "etch") and plowing a field (with the noun "furrow") to situate the always already here presences of these personages:

You cannot hold anything against this calm and tranquil occupation: the story of Zoroaster, that of Plato, that of Jesus Christ and Columbus and Leonardo and Napoleon and many more, did need to get written. In other words, these stories wrote themselves, so to speak. Every one of this cast of characters etched a furrow in the great gray brain of the earth, and we all carry a miniature reproduction of this archetypal brain within us, like a pocket watch or the small round pill of a compass that shows where the sun rises over a worthy citizen’s belly. (the italics are mine)

What a masterful move. You have to hate him a little.