Split This Rock

[passing this along . . .]

If you have not yet registered for Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation and Witness, I urge you to do so! Visit the website at http://www.splitthisrock.org/ to view the schedule and register. As the fest organizers write: "The festival kicks off with a press conference Thursday, March 20 and ends with a silent march and closing ceremony in front of the White House on Sunday, March 23. In between, we will celebrate poetry and activism with panel discussions, workshops, collaborative writing, walking tours, film, and readings."

There is only one week left to save on registration! Before March 10, registration is only $75 or $40 for students, which includes entry to all readings, workshops, panels, receptions, walking tours, and other activities. $25 will buy a day pass, which includes readings, workshops, panels and other activities for one day. Some scholarships are available.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly is a co-sponsor (and is coordinating the guided walking tours). The festival will also include readings, workshops, panels, films and activism. Featured poets: Chris August, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Princess of Controversy, Robert Bly, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri, Lucille Clifton, Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade), Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Brian Gilmore, Sam Hamill, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Kuusisto, Semezhdin Mehmedinovic, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Alix Olson, Alicia Ostriker, Ishle Yi Park, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy, Pamela Uschuk, and Belle Waring.

-Kim Roberts
Beltway Poetry Quarterly
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/

"Dreams of Affluence" & "The Weather Balloon"

So I was trying to figure out how to come up with a series of random numbers (for logging in manuscripts) when it occurred to me to just Google it. Found this way cool random integer generator at Random.org. Super duper.
* * *

This week's featured chap is a day late. We're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but in this case--I love the covers on this chapbook series from Godine. Here are two poems from Ann Deagon's There Is No Balm in Birmingham:

Dreams of Affluence

I am a housewife vacuuming
her swimming pool. Under my toes
under the blue vinyl, moles
hump their tunnels. The cat
lays them pale and dripping at
our doorstep. She has learned
how to dive. The chlorine
has bleached her white.
You cannot tell her from a mole.

I am diving through my life.

The Weather Balloon

In June at seven from the pool
the clearest-eyed child
cries out, has sighted
the weather balloon, tiny as
a bead of quicksilver, a bubble
caught under fathoms of blue.
It will not surface here
where our yard beaches the sky.
At sea in air it drifts, its whole
purpose that drifting. Meteorologists
plot its azimuth. We train
binoculars and our binocular gaze
on its uncaring passage. Our round
pool blinks back the sky. We think
we are tethered. We are all of us
at sea.

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.

* * *

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]

Christian soldiers onward

(sigh.) Good for him, of course, but we wanted Rami to win.

Wee new quilt

Here's the new quilt: the pattern is Chinese Coins; the quilt measures approx. 5.5 x 7.75 inches. Can't wait to do another one.

Yummy

: curried arroz con pollo, sauteed Brussels sprouts, steamed broccoli, & grilled naan.

Snow globe diversions

Check out the amazing snow globe art of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz.

Snow geese on the Susquehanna

(Click on photos to open high-res versions.)

Two poems: Emily Rosko & Richard Garcia

Last week, I browsed through a back issue of the Notre Dame Review (#17, winter '04) and flagged two poems for re-reading. Both, interestingly enough, are about mothers. Each stood out, as far as I'm concerned, from everything else in the magazine.

Here you go:

Scrap

Take the concentration intricate
work requires—a needle, embroidery. The in

and out through the eye, thread and
fabric pulled. Or the cautious

hands of my mother, webbing yarn
into a sweater, the genius

click of her needles. It’s enough
to make me jealous of that kind

of patience. When I took the box of give-
away stuff to the garage

I found swatches of crepe and a lace
tablecloth discolored by

wine, as if a dinner party had
decided to throw their bad manners out

in the open, leave their spoils. The luxury
of this fabric, its airy matter.

I’d like to tailor it, get it down
in a form myself. All you need

is a pattern, she’d tell me. No,
I thought, pawing my scissors,

one snag is all it takes,
one disruption—

: Emily Rosko

* * *
My Mother and Your Mother

My mother and your mother making tea in heaven—no, not heaven, but that place you go to live after you die and have acquired certain skills.

Your mother wants to take my mother to the PX and stock up on Folgers coffee, Ritz crackers and a couple cases of gin. My mother wants to go to the new senior center because she read in the paper they’ll be showing a movie with Mario Lanza. Finally they settle on Italy where your mother was happy for awhile.

Your mother shows my mother the apartment where she lived, the echoing courtyard, and in between the same flapping laundry still hanging on the line, the volcano. After a couple of cappuccinos on the Via Manzoni, your mother agrees, out of her Southern courtesy, to go with my mother to Mexico.

Today is the day she’ll relive being the small girl in the white dress that hands Porfirio Díaz a bouquet of flowers. Overcome with joy, El Presidente announces that he won’t run for office ever again. Viva! Hats and bullets fly through the air and my mother takes credit for starting the Mexican Revolution.

Your mother wants to go home to Charleston and eat some chess pie made out of eggs, brown sugar and butter. Mine wants to eat those hotcakes again she had the first time she crossed the border and thought, What strange tortillas these Gringos eat. As a compromise, they come to see how we’re doing in L.A.

But once here they forget why they came. My mother and your mother, on Olvera St. trying on straw hats. Your mother and my mother at the counter in Bloomingdale’s, spraying Chanel No. 5 on their wrists.

My mother and your mother at Musso and Frank’s. Your mother is deep into her peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Mine is table hopping, collecting autographs. She can’t believe her luck, there’s Gilbert Roland having a martini with Dolores Del Rio.

: Richard Garcia

"Exhibit #1"

We are drawn to chapbooks in many ways: some we happen upon by chance, browsing catalogs and recognizing a name. Some come recommended by writers whose judgment we trust. Others are literally pressed into our hands: private efforts, small collections self-published and shared among friends.

I knew Maggie Paul in college: we were in the same MFA program at Vermont. I've seen her once or twice since those days, both times at AWP, though I can't recall which cities. At one, she gave me a copy of her chapbook, Stones from the Baskets of Others. I've been re-reading it today. Here are two poems:

Exhibit #1

He couldn’t turn away
from the sight of the human brain,
that singular universe
glistening in its own juices.

Looking at that wilderness of river and dream
called into question his own sense of divinity,
the radiance he rose into each day.

Here, pointed the docent, is where memory is.
And here resides emotion.

All his life he’d depended on what he couldn’t see—

About the stars, he had the same complaint.

* * *

On Neruda

Like her, he numbered his poems as they spilled out
over the rim of his life, currents always heading
in the direction of Mathilde, in whose hair he saw
stars and vines, whose hands furnished him with
certain dark things to love. His poems
brim with moons, apples, bread, sky.
Like a pomegranate his heart’s center grew
crowded with seeds and stars, which he
sprinkled across his garden as a way
of insisting on beauty, so that now
his voice pulls me into the earth’s core,
the underneath of love, which is more love.

[photo: fern unfurling, 2/24/08]

Yummy yummy yummy, I've got love in my tummy

Red beans & rice, collard greens and cornbread: my man can cook.

Never mind

Here's a purty flower picture to gaze on: a luminous pink zygocactus I inherited from Lisa Roney when she left Bucknell a few years ago. I don't think it bloomed at all last year, but it's currently gorgeous.

Winter boarder (2)

When I grew geraniums from seed last spring, a few of the laggards never made it outside to the garden, but stayed on the laundry room sill in small pots. This winter, I moved two up to the bathroom window, which gets bright direct sun for a couple of hours. The third plant, which was truly puny, is still in the laundry room and still in its original yogurt cup, but it has finally decided to bloom.

I'm curious to see what color it turns out to be. When I set nine of the others out in a large square planter, they hadn't yet bloomed; I gave a few extras to Jackie next door. Many of my geraniums turned out a garish fuschia or a shriekingly orange-red (too red for my taste; I much prefer the softer, purer red or the near-salmon red-pink ones), while one of Jackie's ended up the prettiest of the batch: a lovely pink-and-white bicolor. For the rest of the year, I glanced through the fence and admired (well all right, coveted) that one geranium.

Little straggler, runt of the litter, you're my last best hope.

[photo: winter geranium, 2/23/08]

[photo: Randy coming in off the lake, 2/24/08]

Weekend update

Twice this week we've heard (and seen) huge flocks of snow geese flying over the house, so on Sunday morning we decided to head out to the Montour Preserve. The lake was still frozen, of course--people were sledding out onto it and walking around. Randy tried to coax me out onto the ice, but I'm a wuss when it comes to the sound of ice cracking--I'd probably keep enough composure to not pee my pants, but just barely.

For pics of the snow geese on Lake Chillisquaque just two years ago (March 10, which reassures me that I was smart not to venture out on yesterday's ice), click here.

While watching the Oscars last night (I can't resist--all that glam), I pieced up a tiny quilt top (just a bit larger than a 5x7 index card, with 48 itty-bitty pieces) in an old pattern: Chinese Coins. I'd been dreaming about this pattern (I mean, literally seeing it in my sleep) and wanted to give it a try. The result is more diminutive than I'd planned (I just start sewing and see how things come out, so planned is a misnomer) but today, looking it over, I'm pretty pleased.

[photo: white pine in snow, 2/24/08]

"The Story of Mist"

This week's featured chapbook is Stuart Dybek's The Story of Mist, a collection of short pieces (stories? prose poems?) published by State Street Press back in 1993. I'm always happy to find chapbooks from this press--they use nice soft paper, wraparound slipcovers, and original artwork. Here's the title piece; it reminds me of a ghazal:

The Story of Mist

Mist hangs like incense in the trees. Obscured trains uncouple in a dusk that is also obscured, and later, a beacon sweeps across the faces of a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing knee-deep in mist.

In a corrugated shed lit by a misty overhead bulb, a welder, working late, looks up from acetylene, then removes his mask to kiss his wife who’s brought him a cold beer.

Smoke smolders through the projection beam as if the old theater is filling with mist: on screen, gigantic faces gaze out at an audience of shadows.

He holds her to him with his left arm, while extending the blue flame away from them with his right, and she holds the foaming bottle of beer away from them as if it too were a torch. When their mouths touch, her breath enters him like mist.

An endless chain of boxcars slams back together with a sound of rolling thunder, thunder smothered by mist.

She can see the mist rising from the hairs along his skin, and touches them as carefully as she might draw a straight razor along the length of his body.

Listen, in the dead of night, high above the mist, steeplejacks are nailing up the new day’s Christ.
A buoy tolls in the mist like the steeple of a little neighborhood church that has drifted out to sea.
A freighter, sounding a melancholy horn, hoists the moon that it’s been towing from a moonlit slick, and tows it through the mist.

"angry packet threaded with love"

That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person,
trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to
be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down
and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange,
angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought
there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then,
and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who
want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if
we are not to give ourselves away.

: Adrienne Rich, from "Sources: XXIII" in Your Native Land, Your Life

I can't stop reading this poem

Stroking My Head with My Deception Stick

Someone has shut down the local shimmer
but not the police who thought

it was Sunday and so spent hours
arranging their long and pliant hair.

Constable Jacques is the best man I know
but even he won’t converse with the dead.

The dead are so vain and hungry—
they will straddle your mirrors and swallow

your oak trees with their huge elastic lips.
And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children, if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.

: Heather Christle, in Third Coast (Fall 2006)

Memory

The brick house is what we always call it: the house we built in the mid-Sixties. I remember the concrete truck's long U-shaped chute poking through the unfinished frame of a basement window, the wet cement rapidly slurrying down, pouring and splatting into the wire-gridded floor area. I remember the unfinished basement steps, how they were open, how I was always afraid to go down them because someone could reach through and grab me.

Thinking about Ginger and Snowball: the time Steve shoved Ginger's tail under the kitchen door, the door to the basement steps, and Snowball bit it nearly off, completely severed but for one stringy white (tendon?) cord. How we caught the cat and wailed. Someone said we had to cut it off. No one else would do it, so I snipped it with the kitchen shears. The cat shuddered violently, a quake I can still feel in my spine, and took a dazed step or two, then suddenly scrambled away.

I flung the tail into the front yard, not realizing that we'd find it again, wanting only in that moment to have it away. The yard, a half-acre at most with an immense sycamore and two large chestnut trees, had become a momentary sea of out-there-ness, not the familiar territory I ranged daily, inspecting plants and bugs, the tiny corn-on-the-cob-shaped castings that I thought were seeds until I watched one slip, still wet, from a caterpillar's anus. I hadn't known I was playing with shit.

This was knowledge before experience: learning the names of trees and birds, collecting seeds, watching a solar eclipse through a pinhole focused on a sheet of paper. I don't even remember what happened to Ginger, only that Mother was furious that afternoon about the tail. Later the facts would reconfigure, polished or worn down in the mind's tumbler, that ceaseless worrying. How we touch and touch, worrying memories, wearing them, wearing them down.

Iced

A wintry mix--

--is forecast for late tonight. We've had snow all day: a fine, steady powder; the sleet and freezing rain are due in the early hours. I let my students know yesterday that I don't plan to go fishtailing over the mountain if conditions deteriorate; they're e-mailing their homework in. (See, I can handle myself in this brave new cyber-world.)

So we'll see in the morning.
* * *
Last week, I sorted about 150 poetry books from (half of) the shelves in the dining room and set them all aside to donate. In observing my own "thinning" process, I've noticed that some of the books I'm parting with now are the same ones I couldn't give away just two years ago. For example, I'm willing to part with four or five volumes of Seamus Heaney, but that's mainly because I have his selected poems (Opened Ground). Conversely, I'm completely unwilling to donate my Marvin Bell collection (I have every book, and yes, I still read them).

I started donating books to the poetry library at the Stadler Center back in 1994, just after my fellowship in the Younger Poets Seminar. I had a pretty good job at the University of Houston, and the one thing I loved to spend money on was books. In Houston, there were two Half Price Books stores--in Montrose and in the Rice Village. I scoured the poetry sections a few times a month. Ended up with double copies of a few books, or good hardcover copies of titles I already had in paperback.

I don't know why having my own poetry "library" was so important, but it was a very specific goal: I wanted to be completely surrounded by these books, to have at hand all my favorite poets. There wasn't a room in the house without bookcases. One year, for my birthday, David had custom bookcases installed along one whole wall of my study.

I didn't shun traditional libraries: the Montrose branch, the Carnegie library just south of our neighborhood, the downtown public library, and especially the campus library at UH, where I loved to browse the stacks, pull down books at random, and discover new writers. In my classes this week, we've been talking about technology: how our growing dependence on (or fascination with) so many tools (toys) is changing the way we think, interact, communicate. It's sad to note that students rarely show interest in books. (We talked, for example, about dictionary-browsing; I was trying to describe the pleasure of being distracted during the search for a particular word by random others along the path. They felt that such activity was a colossal waste of time: why meander when you can take a virtual superhighway to a quick "answer"?)

When I left Bucknell, the hardest part was turning over my keys to the Stadler Center, because it meant I'd no longer have access to the poetry library I'd worked for over a decade to expand. I still miss it.

The poetry selection in the Lycoming College library is spotty at best. Naturally, I felt compelled to do something about it. I've already donated 100 books. But what to do with the present culling? They're good books: Brodsky, Frost, Heaney, Levine, Amichai, Levertov, Gerstler, and dozens of others. The ideal destination is still the Stadler Center: I know that, if nothing else, the June Poets will ransack the shelves and read, read, read; they always do. Problem is, I feel like such an exile from Bucknell. I'd keep donating to Lycoming, but I've yet to meet one student there who reads poetry. On the other hand, it's such a small campus; a couple hundred poetry books make a significant impact on the library's holdings. But what's the point of putting them on the shelves if they're never read?

I love books. Love them. But the obsession I pursued in my 20s and 30s--of having them--feels more like hoarding.

In one of Marge Piercy's early books, To Be of Use, the title poem speaks of the longing of everyday objects. I'm trying to remember the exact line (I could look it up if--ha!--I hadn't donated the book), something like "The pitcher calls out for water": the sense is that we honor everyday things when we put them into service. What's the use of unread books?
* * *
One of the books I'm "voting off the island" is a 1987 omnibus volume from Five Fingers Press, titled Three West Coast Women. It features poems from (duh) three writers: Laurie Duesing, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. We've pretty much all read work by two of these poets--Addonizio and Laux have had good success (Dorianne has, incidentally, signed this copy "For Jim" and "MacDowell '88")--but I never saw another poem by Laurie Duesing. (I could, like my students, simply Google her, but that's not the point: in all my book shopping, we've never again crossed paths.)

So. Here's a poem by Laurie Duesing:

Faux Pas

The cardiac patient waves his flaccid cock
at every nurse. The hysterectomy victim
flashes her visitors. When you are ill,
you are allowed everything.
My father has been dying for 15 years,
an unspeakable violation of etiquette.
Even my mother notices because he keeps trying
to kiss me on the mouth.
He thinks now he can get away with it.
Her lips were always thin
but this is not my problem.
If I move closer to him, she stiffens.
I can be trusted though it’s not for her
I keep my distance—his mouth
is too late and it’s the lesson they taught me
years ago: how to behave myself,
inhibitions they think catastrophe exempts
them from. This is why I will never have children,
why dying is no excuse.

Tinkering--

--with a new template and fonts. I've tweaked font colors on posts going back through December (I think) and will fix the rest as I can. Meanwhile, I'm glad that I can finally add blogrolls and such (and not feel like a total idiot).

Orphaned poem

Dead Letter: August, 1993

The St. Augustine has overrun the blueberries. Again I pull
the knotty runners, tough snapping roots. My scraped hands
bleed. Mint fills the blackberry bed. The berry canes escape,

runners tunneling under, springing up bristled and gangly
fifteen feet away, beneath the fig trees I set too close, because
I was impatient, because I wanted our garden now, not after

you’d gone. Scarlet runner beans climb string teepees. Basils
everywhere. Seven kinds of rosemary. My favorite: a trailer in
near-constant bloom, prostrate, rooting into the mulched paths

at every point that touches ground. No asparagus (its deep
preparation, five-year wait). No grapes, though you wanted
grapes, though I gave in and planted grapes: the vines outran

the trellis, sprawl along the roof I’m too afraid to climb on.
Lemon grass tall and waving in a single season like bundled
flashing knives. Oregano. Pennyroyal. Bay beside the door,

because we tired of hauling it inside in winter. Now, when freezes
threaten, I wrap the tree in quilts, tuck a work light beneath
for warmth. Our darling monster bay. I lost the lemon

eucalyptus. Haven’t tried again. Cilantro’s green all winter.
And parsley. The epazote I tried only once refuses to go away:
knotty seedlings spring up in the daylily beds, in the roses,

through cracks in the concrete drive. More blueberries. A peach
that’s never kept its fruit, just nickel size. An Asian pear. Figs.
A scarlet passion vine I grew from seed, coddling it along for five

months before I set it out, certain two days later it was dying.
Surprised to later find the tendrils snagging roses. That blossom
worth the wait, like the night-blooming cereus I’d started from

a leaf: perfection. You’d have said so. You’d hardly recognize
the garden now.

"Photograph"

I was astonished to find Robert Pinsky's First Things to Hand at the new(ish) Borders store a few months back: it was the only chapbook in the entire poetry section (I looked). Sarabande has created a beautiful series with their Quarternote chapbooks, and this collection (which became part of Pinsky's new book, Gulf Music) is an excellent choice for inclusion in the series. I love Pinsky's work. I love his mind, and how he connects to the physicality and history of language, to language as a palpable essence, part of the physical world.

Our wee campus library just acquired a copy of Gulf Music last month; I put a hold on it and they contacted me Wednesday to come pick it up. I've read "Poem of Disconnected Parts" to my students for a couple of semesters since it was first on Poetry Daily--awesome poem--but here's one from the chapbook:

PHOTOGRAPH

Light-inscribed
Likeness

Vulnerable to light,
To the oils of the hand.

The paper sensitive
The dyes ephemeral

The very medium
A trace of absences.

Speed of the years
Speed of the shutter.

The child's father
Crouches level to her

With the camera and so
She crouches too.

Agile the dancer,
Little room

Of the camera, wide
Gaze of exposure—

Shiva the maker
Shiva the destroyer:

The flash of your hammer
Fashions the shelter.

Take me here.

So while internet-skipping, trying to recollect the name of the restaurant that served such yummy Ethiopian food in Baltimore way back at AWP (what year was that?), I ended up at the website for Typecast Press.

Wiping away the drool.

Harrison

I've been re-reading Jeffrey Harrison's The Singing Underneath this week, bit by bit as I find time. I'd pulled it from the shelf while sorting poetry books to donate to our campus library (which has a woefully small selection--truly in need of a boost), remembering vaguely that I'd liked the book well enough when I bought it years ago. (The book was published in 1988 as part of the National Poetry Series: the same year as Marie Howe's The Good Thief and Cole Swensen's New Math.)

I've truly enjoyed reading through it again. There's a sense of closure--or if not closure, then a kind of finish--to each of the poems; each is well-thought and well-shaped, formal but not off-puttingly so, and deceptively deft in its shifting. It's easy to see why James Merrill selected this collection. Here's a sample poem from early in the book:

THE HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER

If what we wait to see partly defines us,
then this red bulb hanging in the blue
is a simple model for the heart,
swaying slightly at the end of its string
as I rock slightly, standing next to it,
eyes fixed, waiting for the buzz, the blur
of wings, the body like a tiny seal's
balancing the feeder on its nose.

Surely these moments we stand on tiptoe for
make us what we are as much as pain
and sorrow: the moment the hummingbird
flashes his red throat, the moment he spreads
his tail and swerves off like a fish, a green
streak, then sticks like a leaf to a branch--
the moment he stops in midair and sticks
his beak into that severed artery.

As he drinks, an embolism forms,
like the bubble in a spirit level,
and rises slowly up the tube, a bit
of the outside world going in, a moment
trapped: like one of those clear marbles
in which everything is upside-down, and small.
As the last drop quivers and disappears
with the bird, the heart becomes a mind.
* * *

It's foggy tonight, unusually so: a dense, swirling fog that tempted us to drive home from grocery shopping along the low-lying route (River Road) just for the little-kid thrill of feeling lost in it.
* * *

Thanks to Eduardo. (I put an extra something in the envelope.)

* * *

And extra thanks to Randy, who got my laptop back in working order while I was off grading papers this afternoon.

I'm not hiding . . .

I've been revamping my other blog.

Winter boarder

I swiped a cutting of this plant from a neighbor last fall (over a year ago). It was late October or early November, and I was out trolling for last-minute snippings of tender annuals to coddle indoors over the long winter. In the planter, the original plant (or "mother plant," as we gardeners call it) had bloomed delightfully all summer and fall, and I'd admired it enough to covet one. One night, when a particularly bitter cold snap was forecast and the neighbor had decided (or neglected) to drag in (or cover) his plantings, I knew it was now or never. I think I actually pinched two cuttings. Stuck them in water on the kitchen windowsill and hoped for the best.

They took months to root. I hadn't expected such a delay, but maybe the cold had already shut down some survival mechanism; I don't know. In fact, only one cutting survived. I coddled it along and put it outside in a small pot on the patio table when spring rolled around. It slowly grew, but never bloomed. In late summer, I repotted it. Still no blooms. I brought it inside anyway in the fall and gave it half a shelf in the sunny window of the laundry room, where it continued to grow and sprawl and, finally, this winter, to bloom.

I'd tell you what it is, but I can't remember its name. I've thumbed through my mental catalog of blue-flowering annuals (Browallia? Streptocarpus?), but nothing sounds right. For now, it remains a gorgeous stranger.

You're never as smart as you think you are.

I just took the online Jeopardy! test: fifty questions, 15 seconds to respond to each, no pausing, no going back.

I don't really type that fast. Even if I thought I knew the answer in the first few seconds, I was panicked about not getting the words typed in quickly enough.

On the other hand, wouldn't it be great if, instead of booking a hotel and flying off to MLA, you could simply answer a timed online interview? The distillation of anxiety into a bearable few minutes?

"Describe your teaching philosophy. You have fifteen seconds."

In praise of . . .

. . . the clementine. I eat them by the crate. Like candy.

Harms

Heading over to Bucknell Hall in a few minutes to catch the James Harms reading. Seems like years since I last settled into the back row with my sewing. . .

57.

57 essay drafts = one big honking bite out of my weekend. What, it's Sunday night already?

Poem

It snowed yesterday: nothing major, just enough to flock the trees. This morning, I was grateful that we'd bought the extendable-arm scraper as I cleaned off the truck windshield and the top of the cab. Lots of mist/fog on the drive to Williamsport, but the roads were fine. It's Friday, and I'll post this evening about a chapbook, but for now, here's the "daily poem" I will read to my comp students:

Because You Asked about
the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Poetry Residence at Bucknell

Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing

Named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bucknell graduate and initiated in the fall of 1993, the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing offers an emerging writer four months of unfettered writing time during Bucknell's fall semester, without formal academic obligations. The Residence is designed to grant the writer time to complete a first or second book. The resident presents a public reading of his or her work and otherwise constitutes a literary presence on campus during the fall. Providing lodging on campus, an office in the Stadler Center for Poetry, and a stipend of $4,000, the Residence is awarded to writers of prose (fiction or creative nonfiction) and poets on an alternating basis.

The Stadler Center is currently accepting applications from poets for the 2008-09 Philip Roth Residence. The Residence will extend from late August 2008 through mid-December 2008. mid-December 2008. Click here for application instructions.

Philip Roth Resident, Fall 2007: Rajesh Parameswaran: A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Rajesh Parameswaran has published short stories in McSweeney's, Book Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, and elsewhere. His story "Demons" received honorable mention in Best American Short Stories 2003. He has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, and has worked as a law clerk for a U.S. District Court. A native of Chennai, India, he has lived in Michigan, Texas, Connecticut, and New York City.

Former Philip Roth Residents:
1993-94: Blake Maher (fiction)
1994-95: Roger Fanning (poetry)
1995-96: Pamela Leri (fiction)
1996-97: Joe Wenderoth (poetry)
1997-98: Rhonda Claridge (fiction)
1998-99: Adrian Oktenberg (poetry)
1999-00: Tom Franklin (fiction)
2000-01: Ron Mohring (poetry)
2001-02: Junse Kim (fiction)
2002-03: Brian Teare (poetry)
2003-04: Michelle Hoover (fiction)
2004-05: Melora Wolff (poetry)
2005-06: Emily Rapp (fiction)
2006-07: Beth Martinelli (poetry)

Buy my book!

What a deal: for only seven bucks postpaid, I'll even sign it for you, and your money will go directly toward publishing more poetry (I'll put it in my Seven Kitchens Press account). Just send $$ via Paypal to sevenkitchens@yahoo.com, or e-mail me for details. And thanks to all the folks out there who continue to read my work. I truly appreciate it.

Inventory

Last week, Randy printed photos of all the quilts we've done in the past two years. His first project was a queen-sized Starburst pattern in late 2005; mine was a Trip Around the World wall quilt that I insanely pieced together block-by-block (instead of taking the shortcut of strip piecing it)--if I hadn't kept all the tiny pieces in correct order on the flannel wall, I'd have given up on that one. Since then, we've made mainly wall quilts and minis, though each of us is currently working on a full-sized quilt.

This afternoon, I put all the photos into sheet protectors and typed up the information we had at hand on all the quilts--nineteen of them in just two years--so we can try to put together a decent portfolio of our work. It's a fun project, a perfect example of the kind of fussy tinkering work that I like to do, and a source of solid encouragement as we tackle new and larger quilts. (His is coming along very well. It's taken me two years to make mine by hand, and now I need to borrow a big conference table so I can baste the whole thing and get started on quilting it. There will be pictures, believe me. Someday.)

In between the large projects--the ones that take months or sometimes years--I like working on minis. I can sit after dinner and watch TV or a movie and get in an hour or more of quilting. These small quilts, usually less than 16 inches square, are portable, easy to pick up, easy to set aside and come back to later. I just finished quilting a whole cloth mini, my first, and need to make the binding so I can finish it. The pattern is called "Queen's Crown." The great thing about whole cloth quilts is that they're easy to quilt: it's just one layer of fabric, the batting, and the backing fabric that you're pushing the needle through, as opposed to three or sometimes four layers of fabric with pieced quilts. The down side, if any, is that they're just one color. This one is unbleached muslin, but I had to jazz it up, so I backed it with a brighter fabric, a nice solid golden orange. This really shows off the "back side" and underscores the other main appeal of whole cloth quilts: the back looks just as good as the front, so you essentially get two quilts in one. What's kept me from finishing this one is the dilemma of how to bind it. If I use the orange, the front side will look weird (muslin framed in orange); if I use the unbleached muslin, the back side will look awful (orange framed in muslin). The solution, of course, is to custom-make a two-color binding to match both sides. I think I can do this.

I'll post photos as soon as it's done.

"Objects Contain the Possibility of All Situations"

I know I keep touting the Stanley Hanks Chapbook Series, but it was really great while it lasted. Case in point: in 1995 they published The Kindling Point by H.L. Hix. It's a great chapbook, containing 32 poems. The title of each is a borrowed line from another text--sources include Plato, Wittgenstein, Chomsky--but the poems aren't coldly intellectual; instead, each uses the borrowed line as a jumping-off point. The borrowed lines are sometimes integrated into the text as well. Hix has a whole book of these (Perfect Hell), but this chapbook predates the longer collection and, to my taste, less is more.

One more thing: I looked up the St. Louis Poetry Center online, and the remaining chapbooks in this series are on sale (click here).

Here's a sample poem from The Kindling Point:

Objects Contain the Possibility of All Situations

I may kill. You should know this about me.
A razor in the night, without warning.
Objects contain the possibility
Of all situations. States of being
Embrace all imaginable events.
Any one life, or pair of lives, harbors
Every death. The succession of presents
Comprehends all foreseeable futures.
I have it in me to be a galaxy
Or one leaf on the frond of a fern.
I may become light in a sanctuary
Kindled by a rose window, or a cairn
Older than the woods it renders holy.
I may become water or earth. I may burn.

Back to basics

Followup to the "PC envy" situation: I've rediscovered overhead transparencies. It feels a bit Stone Age, but then again, when I was an undergrad teaching assistant, I made copies on the blue-ink mimeo machine. . . those were the days.

Shuffling off to bed--

Just sign me "Grampa."

Back to school

Classes started today. I was surprised to find that my classroom is not equipped with a PC. I should have checked in the fall, but I'd been in nearly every classroom on the floor last semester, and they all had PCs, so I figured mine would, too. Doh. To complicate the problem: I teach all three sections in the same room. So, for example, today when I reviewed the syllabus, I had to read stuff to them from the one copy I had printed out, instead of throwing it up on the projection screen for all of us to review together.

Grr. So much of my teaching utilizes on-screen stuff. I hate to lose that element. And I hate to print sixty copies of everything that normally would just take the click of a button or two.

There are no available classrooms with PCs--they've all been snapped up.

I'll adjust.
* * *
The weather here is freakishly warm. We have mud. In January.
* * *
I get to sleep late tomorrow: no Tuesday or Thursday classes. It's a relief, because I had so much trouble falling asleep last night (this always happens the night before a big event, or the first night staying in a new place). I'm pooped.
* * *
Me, me, me: mehhh, I talked too much today. We also did a short writing exercise--just to get a sampling--in which I asked the students to "go back in time" and describe what they were doing ten years ago. What surprised me was how many claimed they couldn't remember anything specific from when they were eight or nine.

"White Garden at the End of My Summer"

Winter break is ending. Classes begin on Monday. I've enjoyed the down time--immensely--but I'm ready to move into the spring semester. My classes meet back-to-back, three days a week; I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to set aside some writing time on the odd mornings. We'll see.

Congratulations to Katie Hays: her manuscript, Dear Apocalypse, will be published in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon. Katie gave an incredible reading this fall at Bucknell Hall: excellent, complex poems. Her work has been published in some great journals lately, and was just up last week on Poetry Daily.

Today's chapbook is Suzanne Rhodenbaugh's The Shine on Loss, which won the 1997 Painted Bride Quarterly Chapbook Contest.

A sample poem:

White Garden at the End of My Summer

Almost every evening, though not more than one bloom
is granted, the moon vine out back will blossom.
I go to the garden and stare.

If it can make one bloom, why not more?
Why can it not be covered, a bounding
full-blossoming vine?

If I took what has been festering, the persistent
eggshells and stinging onion skins,
the slimy tomatoes and coffee grinds and rinds

and basted the roots of the moon vine
with the gloppy rot would I get more
moon vine blossoms?

The size of a hand,
one ghostly trumpet only?
My God, I’m trying to listen.

Why bears watch Jeopardy

Dan Pawson. Go, Cubcake, go!

As promised

Two photos of the quilt we finished last week for my dad. It reached him safely in the mail, so now I can show it without ruining the surprise.

Thanks

Thanks to the good folks at Bat City Review for taking two of my poems. I've been slow-pokey about sending work out this past year. A couple of other poems should be out soon in CrossConnect, but that's about it.
* * *
I don't know John Vincent's work, but this evening as I was sorting through a box of old files, I found this poem in an old issue (summer '98) of the Beloit Poetry Journal:

Clear Cut

Strange.
While I was chopping
there was plenty of shade . . .

Porcupines
emerge, dustballs at an estate sale,
their cries are baby cries.

I forgot its name,
but it's half-otter
half-human, calls from the forest
in the voice of someone you love,
someone you love in trouble.

Amid log smell
and saw leavings puffed to oyster crackers,
in the drizzle, I hear it still.

That thing,
it'll lure you into the forest.
I mean: metaphorically.
* * *
I've commandeered the dining table for the weekend, where Harry's chapbook is being assembled. Randy's loaned me his excellent paper cutter, for which I'm grateful, because it allows me to trim each folio precisely. Also his beading awl. I'm tying the books with a nice dark green fishing line--it has a slightly waxy texture and is easy to work with, threads smoothly through the needle and knots very neatly.
* * *

"Desire"

This week's chapbook is Sonnets by Richard Jones, a beautifully hand-constructed book from the remarkably fine Adastra Press. I bought this book back in the early 90s (it was published in 1990), having accidentally found information on Gary Metras and his press on the internet (this is so much easier to do nowadays that I shudder to recall the hours I spent back then, chasing one dead link after another). The title is somewhat deceptive, as each poem is a deconstruction of what one would usually consider a sonnet (certainly not a new idea, even in 1990), but Jones is more successful, I think, than many others have been at crafting poems with a lingering "sonnet essence" (if you will): unlike, for instance, Gerald Stern's "American sonnets" (which I love), which represent a kind of tightening of the rhetorical reins but which still manage to canter along, I get the distinct sense that these sonnets have gone through careful excisions.

If you haven't checked out Adastra Press, do look them up. Each book is a labor of love.

Here's one poem from the middle of the book:

Desire

Knowing our desire for details,
the evening news tells us
how the man died, and even a little
of what he did, his work, and whom he loved.

He worked in an office downtown.
At night he rode the train home.
There’s the point of entry: the broken window.
There, the bed where he was sleeping

just as he left it when he heard the intruder.
The camera hurries through the house
like a reader skimming pages
to the place where his life

is outlined in chalk,
the knife held up to the lights.

7KP update

The initial set of Harry Humes' Underground Singing was printed last week. I spent the evenings cutting the pages to size and tying up a few mock-ups (the photo at left shows copies of the cover hanging up to dry above my corner desk after being run off on my inkjet printer). The publication date was set for December 21 (Yule) and everything was ready except the cover stock, which I ordered online and which still has not arrived from Texas. The post office is closed tomorrow, so my best guess is that I'll be assembling the book and mailing out copies by Friday.

New Richard Tayson

I'm very excited to hear that Richard Tayson has a new book coming out next month: The World Underneath. I've been a fan of Richard's poems since I first read them in the old James White Review (way before it was taken over--and ruined--by the Lambda Foundation); many of those early poems ended up in his first book, The Apprentice of Fever.

You can follow this link to pre-order Richard's book. Click here to view his home page, which includes a schedule of spring readings.

Happy Yule--

--to everyone, a couple of days late, but good wishes to you just the same. We had a quiet holiday at home and spent much of it quilting. R and I have tag-teamed on a special quilt that I'd originally hoped to finish last month--it's my fault for getting a late start on it. We finished the quilting last night, and I cut and pressed fabric for the binding and managed to complete one side. There will be photos of the finished quilt soon.

Yesterday I got the urge to make a Sawtooth Bars mini, and after some trial-and-error piecing on the sewing machine (the triangle squares are less than one inch across and I kept getting them turned the wrong way), I finally got the hang of it and knocked this one out. It measures about 12 x 14. We made a large version two years ago in brown and indigo blue; my mom has that one now.

Meanwhile, I have been working on a small whole cloth quilt, about 14 inches square, and making good progress: it's much easier to quilt when you don't have to stitch through seams. I'll post photos of this one, too, as soon as it's finished (end of January, I'm guessing).

"To the Moon Over the Mountain"

I've decided to "regularize" my posts about others' chapbooks as a Friday feature. Tune in every week for a cover image and sample poem (or two) from the selected chapbook.

This week's entry is Burning the Fake Woman by Susan Yuzna, published by GreenTower Press. My copy cost $6, a first edition published in 1996. Hand-tied, 39 pages, with a two-color cover.

Here's a sample poem:

To the Moon Over the Mountain

They say you are old hat.
On TV tonight, they claim you were conquered
by the men sitting there, white-haired now,
lightly bouncing off your body
in their thick-soled boots
like boys on a trampoline.

Twenty-five years ago
and what do we know about the nature of anything?
There was a saint, once, claimed
more demons work between us and the moon
than move through the entire rest of the cosmos.
St. Jerome, I think it was.

But what I know is
when you let loose your fullness
and allow me no sleep, I must leave my house.
I must walk around and around
the door of the beloved,
for mystics have said

it is most foolish
to presume entry: a ferocious, white fire.
That shadow on the wall
was once a person
walking forward, hand outstretched.
Once a person coming toward you.

The Halo Rule

I've been waiting for the publication of Teresa Leo's The Halo Rule ever since I heard she won the Elixir Press Editor's Prize last year. I've read and admired Teresa's bold poems for years--she's one of the poets I would have loved to have published in West Branch--so this book's release feels like a celebration. Join in. Buy the book from SPD here or from Amazon here.

Respite

I turned in my grades yesterday. They've made grade reporting a breeze: it's all done online, which works for me, because I keep spreadsheets all semester and can simply toggle between windows, tap in the grades, and be done.

We watched a Netflix DVD last night, House of Sand and Fog, about which I knew nothing except that Ben Kingsley had been nominated for an Oscar for his role. I vaguely remembered a snippet from the movie, that little bit they play at the Academy Awards when they read the list of nominees--Kingsley's character shouting "This is our house!" Our house!" at a distraught Jennifer Connelly--but that's really all. I didn't even know that it was based on an Andre Dubus novel.

So we were a bit open-mouthed at the last few scenes, where things just keep going from bad to worse (that's all I'll say--don't like spoilers--but don't look this movie up on Wikipedia if you want to be at all surprised during the film). What a downer! It reminded me of the time I mistakenly brought home Interiors one day when David was home sick from work: I'd thought a nice Woody Allen flick would cheer us up, but by the time the masking tape came out, we were both fully in the doldrums (and yet, as with House, we couldn't tear our eyes away until the bitter end). (And it wasn't entirely my fault with the Woody Allen mistake; it was his first serious drama.)

A Dream of Adonis

A Dream of Adonis is the title of a new poetry collection by David Brendan Hopes. I don't know his work, but I received the postcard at left this past week from the good folks at Pecan Grove Press, who published my third chapbook back in 2001. I'm happy to pass along the news.

"My hands know/ so little of your hands."

I sleep late. I get up. We eat a late breakfast. I settle in to grade papers from the diminishing stack on my desk, here in the corner of the bedroom. My laptop is set up on a small folding table. As I grade each essay, I fold it in half with just the writer's name visible and staple it closed. I add it to the growing stack against the wall. So pass the days, with breaks for tea or something light to eat. We fix dinner sometime around six. We eat and watch the television. I move to the Shaker rocker in the corner of the living room, turn on the lamp, and pick up my quilting--sometimes for an hour, sometimes more. The current quilt is starting to near completion; I'm still hoping to finish it in the next week.

* * *

Here's a poem by Tim Seibles, from his chapbook Ten Miles an Hour, published in 1998 by Mille Grazie Press:

Not Spoken

As if thirst were not a wound.
As if the thirst for company were not a wound.

Consciousness the one shadow
from which light grows.

As if all ache flowed from the same bruise.

Near dawn. My blood caught in its circle.
I think of your body your legs opening.

And the light hairs strung along your wrists.

As if your shoulders.
As if the muscular turn of your hips.
As if I could tilt your mouth
to this dent in my chest.

So, bit by bit, it becomes unmistakable.
This not knowing how to say.

As if I had already broken
into the last room and found the words
still not English.

As if being flesh were not call enough.

Why stay here to be American?
Where what is exactly sexual has no country.

Let’s go.
Whole words. Whole worlds slow
between us. Trying to pronounce themselves.
Unlost.

The body, the one sacred book.

My hand. My hands know
so little of your hands.

The names of pleasure held
in chains taken in ships.

Say it isn't so

I don't want to talk about it.

Aleda Shirley

Back when the Stanley Hanks Chapbook Series was running, I could think of no other chapbook series that I dreamed more of entering (and winning, of course: I wanted a book as beautifully made as H.L. Hix's Kindling Point or Aleda Shirley's Silver Ending). Today there are probably hundreds of small and micro presses turning out chapbooks--some of them (like Tarpaulin Sky) truly beautiful at the Book Arts level, and others (like Pudding Press) (forgive me, but it's true) cranking out quantity over quality. Still, I go back to the Hanks Series often, not only to reread the poems, but also to hold these books in my hands and aspire to making something at their level.

From Aleda Shirley's Silver Ending, published in 1991:

Aware

The day before Christmas it was fifteen below, and windless,
the river willows perfectly still in a light coating of snow.
Early that morning I stood on the shore and watched steam rise
off the river, mistaking its movements for the river’s, which was still,
the surface threaded with thin and delicate scratches
as if skaters had glided through an endless series of school figures
all night while we slept. Nothing moved, except the steam
which moved in one direction only—up—into a sky
smoking back at it like dry ice. Nothing was moving
except the moment, and my hectic sense that it was over,

that the moment would change even before the weather did.
But I wanted to hold this moonscape fast in my mind
where it would join other ghostly postcards, like a sunset
off Key West a year ago, as we returned from a snorkeling trip
out on the reef. Everything was painted in simple colors:
the blue water, the red sun, Mike’s yellow shirt.
And the deaf scuba diver I’d watched all day signing
to his hearing girlfriend signed something to her again
and she asked if I’d snap their picture as they posed
in the stern of the boat, the sunset behind them. It’s a picture

so vivid, even now, that I expect to happen upon it
when I leaf through the pages of my photograph album.
I used to think I understood this, the rapt attention
at which I stood during certain moments of transition:
the bright-gray color the air has in the spring, right before
it rains, when the grass and budding trees are too green,
their lushness somehow scary. I thought I knew the reason
I sometimes set the alarm for hours before I have to get up,
just so I can re-set it and linger for a little while
in the blue light of dawn and listen to the mourning doves

as they begin to grieve in the trees outside the window.
I thought it had something to do with those years of my childhood
spent in the tropics where, like any place near the equator,
the duration of dawn and dusk is so brief it’s easily missed.
There, twilight was an afterthought of day, an aside,
and the heat so relentless I moved through my life
as if I were drugged from wine. But now I wouldn’t swear
I ever noticed those twilit moments brief as rain,
that this theory isn’t just something I concocted later,
from a book I read. The Japanese call it aware,

that feeling engendered by ephemeral beauty, the way
some things are beautiful because they will change
with the passage of time. I’ve scores of other examples at hand:
just last night, driving home from work, I saw a huge
pale-yellow moon rising in a sky still pink with sunset.
It was so strange, so like the sky of another planet,
that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see other moons,
two or three of them, rising there too. But
the moon, I know, doesn’t rise, not really, nor does the sun
set: the moon moves, moves around us. And we’re turning.

CFS: PSA Chapbook

The Poetry Society of America Chapbook Contest:

Four renowned poets will each choose a winning manuscript for publication and distribution by the PSA. Each winner will receive $1000.

The Two Categories: The PSA National Chapbook Fellowships, judged by Mary Jo Bang and C. K. Williams. This contest is open to any United States resident who has not published a full-length poetry collection. The PSA New York Chapbook Fellowships, judged by Terrance Hayes and Fanny Howe. This contest is open to any New York City resident (in the five boroughs) who is 30 or under and has not published a full-length poetry collection.

Note: Winners will also have the option of teaching a single class at Purchase College for $1,000 under the sponsorship of the Royal and Shirley Durst Chair in Literature. Poets may apply to one contest only. Deadline: December 21st, 2007.

2 0 0 8 Chapbook Fellowships GUIDELINES FOR BOTH CATEGORIES:

1. Manuscript page length: between 20-30 pages. Poems must be typed on 8 1/2" x 11" paper and bound with a spring clip. No illustrations may be included. Do not include photocopies of poems from magazines or journals. Please submit only one copy of your manuscript. Manuscripts should include no more than one poem per page.

2. A complete submission should include: (a) Title page with contest name (The National Chapbook Fellowship or The New York Chapbook Fellowship), your name, address, telephone, email, and any other relevant contact information. Your name should not appear elsewhere in the manuscript. (b) A title page with just the title of the manuscript. (c) An acknowledgements page. Poems included in your manuscript may be previously published, but please include an acknowledgements page listing specific publications. Note: previous publications and/or the inclusion of published poems will not serve as a determining factor in the screening or judging of manuscripts. (d) A complete Table of Contents. (e) Payment of a $12.00 non-refundable entry fee (check or money order payable in U.S. dollars to Poetry Society of America). This fee is not waived for PSA members. Please do not send cash. While you may not submit to both The National Chapbook Fellowship and The New York Chapbook Fellowship, multiple submissions to one contest are accepted. Please note: we require separate entry fees for each manuscript you submit.(f) Self-addressed stamped post card for confirmation of receipt and a self-addressed stamped envelope for announcement of the winners.

3. Manuscripts by more than one author will not be accepted.

4. Translations will not be accepted. Entries will be accepted between October 1st and December 21st, of 2007. Entries postmarked later than December 21st, 2007 will not be accepted. Manuscripts will not be returned. Electronic and faxed submissions will not be accepted. If your manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere, you must notify the PSA.

CFS: Washington Prize

ANNOUNCING 28TH ANNUAL WASHINGTON PRIZE COMPETITION

The Word Works announces its 28th annual Washington Prize competition, offering $1,500 and publication for a volume of original poetry by a living American writer. Previous winners of the Washington Prize include Prartho Sereno (the 2007 winner for her book Call from Paris), John Surowiecki, Richard Lyons, Carrie Bennett, Ron Mohring, Fred Marchant, and Enid Shomer.

Send manuscripts of 48 to 64 pages between Jan. 15 and March 1, 2008, inclusive. Please do not send manuscripts before Jan. 15 or after March 1. Author’s name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and signature should appear on the title page only. Please include a table of contents containing the manuscript title, as well as a cover letter containing your bio and publication acknowledgements. Biographical and publication information must not appear anywhere in the manuscript except the cover letter, which must be detachable from the rest of the manuscript. Use a binder clip to fasten the manuscript. No manuscripts will be returned, but please include a self-addressed, business-sized envelope for notification of contest results.

The winner will be selected by July 1, 2008, and all entrants will receive a copy of the winning book when it is published in January 2009. The entry fee is $25 U.S., by check drawn on a U.S. bank only and made payable to The Word Works. Mail manuscripts to:

Steven B. Rogers, Director
Word Works Washington Prize
3201 Taylor St.
Mt. Rainier, MD 20712

The Word Works is a non-profit literary organization devoted to the dissemination of the best contemporary poetry. It publishes books of poetry in collectors’ editions featuring original artwork. It also sponsors programs such as the Joaquin Miller Cabin poetry reading series in Rock Creek Park and the Cafe Muse Literary Series in Chevy Chase, Md. The Word Works celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2004, and has sponsored the Washington Prize since 1981. For more information about The Word Works and the Washington Prize, please visit http://www.wordworksdc.com/.

Pear Slip

Matthew Hittinger's lovely chapbook, Pear Slip, arrived yesterday at the office. The book is beautifully made and perfect bound, with a full-color cover, and so it's a shame that the gutter margin is so narrow--this makes the left-hand margin of the right-hand pages virtually disappear into the book's centerfold, and is very irritating, because I'd rather not destroy the book in order to read it comfortably. A word to Spire Press: redesign your product!

That being said, it's a lovely collection. It's good to see Matthew getting some well-earned recognition, and I'm very happy to have ordered this chapbook.

Designing books is not easy. It's not that hard, really, but there are so many niggling little details to tweak and adjust. My first chapbook turned out well, as far as I can remember, but the second one had two typos (even though I'd corrected both in galleys). Ander Monson and New Michigan Press did a super job on the third one, but the fourth--well, just ignore the cover.

It's almost always something.

Tomato names

Torbay. Shady Lady. Biltmore. Sophya.
Flavorburst. Mohawk. Big Bomb. Tormenta. Tumbling Tom Yellow.
Goliath. Early Goliath. Bush Goliath.
Cluster Goliath. Sunny Goliath. Italian Goliath.
Big Zac. Carolina Gold. Big Beef. Better Boy.
Abraham Lincoln. Celebrity. Heartland. Floralina. Jet Star. Keepsake.
Lemon Boy. Pink Girl. Sun Leaper. Pilgrim.
Tomande. Kada Hybrid. Super Marzano. Quimbaya.
Sweet Cluster. Tomcat. Mountain Fresh. Tolstoi. Totem.
Amana Orange. Anna. Beefsteak. Box Car Willie.
Black Krim. Aunt Ruby's German Green.
Brandywine. Cherokee Purple. Dinner Plate. Cuore de Toro.
Caspian Pink. Druzba. German Head. Giant Belgium.
Georgia Streak. Kellogg's Breakfast. Lillian's Yellow Heirloom.
Mister Stripey. Mortgage Lifter. Old German. Omar's Lebanese.
Oxheart. Pineapple. Prudens Purple. Ponderosa Pink.
White Potato Leaf. Amish Paste. Arkansas Traveler. Black Sea Man.
Bonny Best. Wins All. Homestead. Legend. Golden Jubilee.
Mule Team. New Yorker. Nebraska Wedding. Rutgers. Opalka.
Saucey. Striped Stuffer. Taxi. Vera. Tigerella. Sunray.
Silvery Fir Tree. Garden Peach. Banana Legs.
Bloody Butcher. Green Zebra. Hard Rock. Moonglow. Porter.
Oregon Spring. Red Pear. Roman Candle. Stupice. Sub-Arctic Plenty.
Amish Salad. Brown Berry. Grapette. Cupid. Fond Red Mini.
Chocolate Cherry. Sugar Lump. Jenny. Juliet. Marcellino Hybrid.
Snowberry. Red Star. Riesenstraube. Small Fry. Micro Tom.
Tumbler. Velvet Red. Tami. Sungold. Sweet Million.

Where the World Is

I migrate from one office to the next with some regularity--at least once a year for the past seven years--and though it can take me a while to settle in, one of the first things I do is transport some books. It's just not "my space" without them. I put mainly poetry on my shelf, but also some prose: even though I never have time to re-read it, I still like to glance up and see some of these books near at hand. A quick sampling of what's on my office shelf includes Robin Becker's The Horse Fair, Joe Bolton's The Last Nostalgia, Norman Dubie's Radio Sky, Roger Fanning's The Island Itself, Rigoberto Gonzalez's So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, Linda Gregg's The Sacraments of Desire, Kimiko Hahn's The Artist's Daughter, Terrance Hayes' Hip Logic, Lyna Hull's Star Ledger, Cynthia Macdonald's Living Wills, Dionisio Martinez's History As a Second Language, Molly McQuade's Barbarism, and Adam Zagajewski's Canvas; in prose, I can't live without Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being or Adrienne Rich's What Is Found There. This is just a smattering of the books here in my office, and though I rarely have time to pull one down and read a page (or poem) or two, I feel better knowing they're around.

I have one small shelf in my other office. It's loaded with about ninety chapbooks.

* * *

I became a fan of Janet Kauffman's stories back in my Houston days, when someone recommended Places in the World a Woman Can Walk. I was excited to find a book of her poems, Where the World Is, at Half Price Books in Houston back in 1995--in February, to be exact--and if I have nothing else to thank Tim Liu for, I'm still glad that he got rid of this book (his name's inscribed inside the cover). I've worn this book out. It travels from office to office. Here's one of the poems:

Watching the Body

They know it’s not death, this yellowing
shaking in sleep, the nurses and fathers,
the husbands who sit in small chairs or travel
room to room. They know that the body is healing.

They believe that it heals throughout a cold night
while the garden is blackening, wherever it is, low in a hollow.
The dark of tomato and pumpkin vines, the armfuls
of spined leaves, blink into ghost and black paper.

They say when the body is healed and walking
deliberately through green grass, and down the long hill
into the garden that’s gone, it will lift up these vines
and find for itself a tomato, some few, under leaves,

red and whole, they promise it, untouched
by any veil, or obliteration. But the body, the stubborn bride,
sends her kisses around the room, aimless, incontrovertible.
She’ll walk in her flesh until it has all but worn away.

: Janet Kauffman, Where the World Is (1988)

[photo: snow on geranium]