Everything that stinks is instinctual.

Since I last posted at the end of July, I’ve had a few publications: “The Casualty Notification Officer” and “Everything that Divides” at Prick of the Spindle (love their layout and design so much); “Improving on Nature” at Strange Horizons; and a scifaiku at microcosms.

I’ve also been playing with a text-to-movie application and have made two “movies”: Improving on Nature and The Queen of England Talks About Pigeons. Those have been a lot of fun. I end up spending all kinds of time with little fiddly details but the basics are dead simple.

My poem “Hamiltons” is a contestant in the 10-10-10 Poetry Contest. Each poem had to be ten lines of ten words each somehow relating to the theme of “ten.” Some of the other poems are pretty sweet too. I was initially undecided about submitting – Peg and I had dinner last week and had a long conversation about this market, which pays well (and the editor certainly has his heart in the right place) but which is more of a popularity contest than about the merit of the poetry (the winner is decided according to how many positive comments it gets). I ended up deciding that I wanted the exercise of writing within the limits he’d set, and I’d had what I thought was a pretty good idea for what to write about—and then once it was written I figured I might as well shoot for the $242 prize, and worse case scenario my entry fee would go to some other poet. If you like my poem, please say so in their comments!

not broken, but rearranged

I’m liking what I’ve read so far of Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne’s poetry:

  • Reb reprinted On the day of your favorite color: at the BAP blog
  • A selection at the Drunken Boat (including “It is not impossible to survive,” from which today’s subject line is taken)
  • Five poems in the No Tell Motel archives. Mmm. I’ve printed “Bend, Bend, Break” to put in my re-read binder.

    • As for me, there’s The Silence of Too Much To Say at unFold, and a packet almost ready to mail out. According to my submissions log, it’s the first snail mail batch I’ve prepared this year. Oy and oof. Maybe I’ll declare October to be la grande PegPoSubMo. (Maybe I should get back to the Must Dos currently in the way of my Wanna Writes. Yeah.)

    Who Am I?

    I am trajectory and flight—
    The archer, arrow, and the bow—
    The swift parabola of light—
    And I the rising and the flow,
    The falling feather of the cock,
    The point, propulsion, and the flood
    Of blackbirds twanging from the nock,
    And I the target and the blood.

    Who am I? (And what poet wrote this riddle?)

    divine suppleness and strength

    A couple weeks ago (8/29), the New York Times Magazine published photographs and videos of elite women tennis players by Dewey Nicks.

    In yesterday’s magazine, the writers to the editor included one Sam Abrams, who quoted Walt Whitman at length:

    fierce and athletic girls … are not one jot less than I am,/They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,/Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,/They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,/They are ultimate in their own right — they are calm, clear, well-possess’d of themselves.

    “Let me see your feet.”

    It’s the height of summer, and my hands currently smell of basil and garlic. (I’m making pesto with the last of last week’s leaves before improvising some sort of okra-onion curry for dinner.) I’ve got Rameau on the CD player and assorted windows open. Let me tell you about some of them…

    Recently published:

  • You can tell…, at microcosms (today!)
  • Cheshire knife…, at microcosms (August 2)
  • The song goes…, at PicFic (July 19)
  • By the waters…, at microcosms (July 16)

    • Some poems I’ve printed out or e-mailed:

  • Pin Setter, by Chris Green
  • Lightning Bugs and the Pleiades, by Coleman Barks
  • Horizon of Feet, by Philip Dacey

    • A collection I’m enjoying (and which I’ll be reviewing for Galatea Resurrects): Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

    A collection I need to return to: the postings at the Blue Print Review blog under the “moment” tag. The entries that held my eye at first glance:
    “sky crossing 2,” “sky crossing 1,” “missing words,” “december in just a moment,” “samurai” (this one’s getting rec’d on the fandom blog when I steal some other moment to update it)

    Current squee: I’ve managed to draft 22 pieces in 23 days as a participant in 24/7 (actually 23 pieces in as many days, but I didn’t manage to finish anything within day 8), as well as one twelve-line poem outside of the project. That pleases me — and so does one of the pieces being scooped up for publication within hours of my posting it privately to the group. (The editors said they were “smitten” by it! I will thunk back to earth as soon as I turn to the next page of my notebook — ars longa, verse nty-nth — but at the moment, I’m as full of bubbly glee as a flute of sparkling wine.)

    (And speaking of returning to earth, I’d best get back to the making of pesto and curry…)

    the locals roll their eyestalks

    Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. My apologies, peeps. Some news:

    “the side of a highway into Nashville”

    The subject line’s from Sarah Lindsay’s “The Driver,” one of the poems featured on the NYT’s Hot Type: Poems for Summer page this weekend. I love both the wordplay and narrative of Tony Hoagland’s “Summer Studies,” and am entertained by the pairings created by the slant rhymes of Edward Hirsch’s sonnet. (They make me want to spend some time expanding them into new poems of my own…)

    Pieces published since the last time I posted here:

    A Study in Setting at qarrtsiluni (text and audio)

    free from school… at tinywords

    Abyss has no biographer…

    …but its would-be cartographers are legion, if you ask me.

    At any rate, via poems.com, I came across James Longenbach’s Nation review of Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds earlier today. I was put off a bit by the royal assumption within its opening (“We don’t reread great novels or poems because we can’t remember the story; we reread because we want to feel our familiar world becoming strange again”), but I like the incarnation of Dickinson that Longenbach says that Gordon presents, in descriptions such as

    Emily Dickinson was an extraordinarily powerful woman, an artist who was intimidated by nothing—the opposite of a fear-driven recluse, the opposite of the lovelorn spinster that some of her family members were driven to concoct for the world. … The great virtue of Gordon’s biography is that it makes Dickinson the person—sister, friend, seducer, adversary—seem as scary as her poems.

    and

    The people to whom Dickinson was most closely related or most passionately attracted were rampant, larger-than-life figures, and as Gordon demonstrates, “Emily was not an oddity amongst them.”

    and

    A variety of factors may well have determined Dickinson’s decision to seclude herself, but to champion illness as the single most determining factor is to disregard what is otherwise so bracing about Lives Like Loaded Guns: its portrayal of Emily Dickinson as an artist who was, during her lifetime, the victim of nothing.

    I don’t know when I’ll get to this book — or whether I’ll agree with either Longenbach or Gordon once I do — but Longenbach’s writeup definitely makes me more inclined to seek it out than before.

    Publications since I last posted here include:

    “the hem of my dress….” tinywords, 16 June 2010.

    “snatched by the wind…” tinywords, 11 June 2010.

    “Schrodinger plus Descartes….” microcosms, 16 June 2010

    …and I do intend to resume building and revising longer poems later in the summer or fall, but right now other exigencies keep hopping to the front of the queue. It happens:

    Gam zeh ya’avor

    The only way you’ll find happiness
    is to know what you want
    when it is already yours

    and to know
    after it is no longer yours
    that it isn’t the only way you’ll find happiness.

    ~ pld

    (originally written for Joanne Merriam’s Ampersand Project, January 2003)