bits and pieces

Congrats to Larry on his first publication! Check him out, along with the other fine work in the new issue of Limp Wrist. . .
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I'm racing to finish a quilt. It's been so long since I sat down to quilt, I'm out of practice. Keep stabbing my finger. There's DNA on the thread. I licked my other finger and tried wiping the speck of blood off the quilt, so I guess now there are two DNA samples in it.
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So warm today, I feel I should be home raking the yard. I don't rake until spring. Even in April, I'm reluctant to "clean up" the beds--they dry out so quickly if I don't replace the compacted leaves with mulch immediately.
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Trying to catch up on some 7KP projects as well. Thanks for all the well-wishes on our newest project, the ReBound Series. The submission deadline is Dec 21. I won't get the final submission data posted until 12/28 (sorry about the lag time but I'll be out of town).
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I'll be out of town, and most likely away from internet access, from 12/18-12/28. If I don't get back to you immediately, that's why.
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Kudos

Congrats to Greg Wrenn on his chapbook win: Greg's a wonderfully talented poet; I've been hoping and waiting to see a collection and can't wait to get this one.

As promised

Today's mail brought Betsy Wheeler's Start Here, a gorgeously produced chaplet from Small Anchor Press with a very nice letterpressed cover designed by Lindsay Valentin. I've been waiting for this one . . . it's a single long poem; Betsy read several passages from it at her Bucknell reading last year and it really knocked me out. I read the whole thing in one breathless sitting. Go buy this chaplet; it's already half-sold-out.

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I promised Arlene I'd post this poem. It first appeared in Florida Review in 2005:

THIEVERY

There are worse reasons to be caught
at midnight in my neighbor’s yard,
though I can’t think of any. Right
now, arrested mid-reach by the hard

twin headlight beams of her Pontiac,
I fish for a quick excuse. Perhaps
I’ve lost my watch? There’s a knack
to lying; I don’t have it. (Theft,

however, I’ve down pat.) Pockets
stuffed with rattling pods, I stand
unaccused. Virginia’s car groans past.
I’m off the hook; the old gal’s night blind.

Her daylilies surround me: past
their prime, hardly a bloom remains.
In the dark, I snitch the last
ripe pod: shiny seeds, obsidian

black, spill from its flared open end.
They’ll keep three months in my freezer,
sprout grass-thin blades in deep winter
under lights I’ve rigged in my cellar.

Three years, maybe four will pass
before they’re large enough to bloom.
I’ll give the lion’s share away,
persuade Virginia to make room.



[photo: tawny daylily, 2007]

Kudos

Congratulations to Katie Hays, Tyler Mills, Donika Ross, Brandon Som and Becca Wadlinger, whose poems have been selected for the 2007 Best New Poets Anthology!

Fine Poet, Fine Book

Run, don't walk, to your local bookstore to order Jason Schneiderman's debut collection, Sublimation Point. I read the manuscript last year, but it's so much better to now hold this fine book in my hands. I keep coming back to the poem "Now," in particular: quietly conversational yet relentless in its pursuit of laying bare the speaker, the subject, the moment: this is good stuff. Congratulations, Jason!

Here's the poem:

NOW

We leave the subway together,
it's night, and I wish we'd gone to my place.
I say, it's happening, now:
People are coming out of the darkness,
the same darkness we walk through,
with knives and guns and disease.

We turn the corner and you say
Say men, you mean men are pushing men
up against the trees and down against
beds and sideways into tiled walls.
Say men, you say, you mean men.

We are coming to your building,
and I say, Men, yes, I mean men.
Men are forcing their way into each other,
following each other into bathroom stalls
and bedrooms, hiding in parks,
forgetting to be scared,
infecting and infecting and infecting.

We are in the elevator and you say
Say me, you mean me.
Say he pushed me against the bed
or the tree or the wall
and infected me. Say I am infected,
you mean me.

We are here. I am undressing.
I say, You, you are infected and
he is always fucking you.
He is with us in the parks and the clubs
and this bed. I mean you.
I mean him. I mean now.