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.