Author: joanne

people risk their lives on perilous mountains to see these birds

Progress: None. I watched the peregrine falcon who sometimes hangs out on the balcony on the 11th floor of my workplace, instead of writing. Tonight is trivia at the Barley House (pretty much the only thing going on in Concord, NH all winter long) so I don’t expect to get much done. I’m planning to do two poems Saturday to make up for it.

Prompt for today: Read Write Poem on metaphor.

Mirrored at joannemerriam.com.

plants using their bright stamens as tuning forks

I’m getting ready for NaPoWriMo by coming up with lists of prompts and inspiring poems (both of which I’ll be posting here) and thinking about topics I may want to tackle. I definitely want to try to write something about being my grandfather’s pallbearer last month, and maybe something about the arsonist who burned down the world’s largest red cedar bucket, and I want to experiment some more with N+7. I’ll be posting about my progress both here and at my blog. I bought a new notebook, which fits in my purse, and will be trying to write on my lunch hours as well as at home.

Also, I had two poems published last weekend: “The Hitch in Yr Getalong” at My Poem Rocks and “Evolution” at Mise En Poem. If those sites look amazingly similar, that’s because they’re edited by the same person.

Below our skin, rivers.

Since I wrote an entry last, five of my poems have appeared in Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (possibly not safe for work, if your workplace minds cuss words) and another in My Poem Rocks.

Today I’ve been reading David Orr in The New York Times on careerism in poetry, and Seth Abramson’s excellent response, which incidentally doesn’t mention the thing that jumped out at me, which is that great poets are implicitly assumed to be male (“it’s somebody who takes himself very seriously,” emphasis mine), and although probably David Orr didn’t mean it that way, but was just eschewing the questionable grammar of “somebody who takes themselves,” I think we do tend to assume a Great Poet or a Great Anything will be male, so his description was apt if, I suspect, unintended. Anyway, interesting reading, and Abramson’s points about classism are important, I think, although I’m no particular fan of MFA programs (which, at tens of thousands of dollars a year, are hardly democratizing poetry, for all the good they may do their individual students).

I was also very excited this weekend to find out that my friend Sue Goyette has won the CBC Literary Award for English Poetry, for “Outskirts.” The winning pieces will be read on the air on March 4th, and should be available at cbc.ca/podcasting or cbc.ca/wordsatlarge.

Two drinks, minimum, will make you as brilliant as you think you are.

This is some funny advice about how to read poetry aloud (via). I didn’t do any reading while we were in Tennessee for the summer and fall, but mean to get back to it now we’re back, and there doesn’t seem to be an inauguration event planned here in my little town of 42,000 people, but Gibson’s has a reading followed by open mic on the 21st, so I’ll try to go to that.

I’ve posted a list of links about inauguration poetry here.

Gin a body kiss a body