Poetry Book Giveaway: You Can't Lose

Here's another wonderful idea: po-blogger Kelli Russell Agodon has launched a poetry book giveaway to coordinate with National Poetry Month (that's April, y'all). I'm happy to participate. Click here for Kelli's full post/explanation on her blog.

I will be giving away one copy of my book, Survivable World, and one hardcover copy of F. Daniel Rzicznek's Neck of the World (winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award and published in 2007).

All you have to do is write a response to this blog post (this one, right here, the one you are reading right now) before midnight on April 30th. On May 1st, I will randomly select two of the comment posters; each will be mailed one of the books. (So if you post, be sure that I have a way of reaching you in case I need your mailing address.) You don't pay a thing.

Let's play!

Update, 4/06: I've decided to sweeten the odds. For every five persons who respond to this blog post, I'll add a chapbook from my micropress. Right now, we have fifteen comments, so I'm adding three chapbooks to the giveaway pile: reliquary, by Boyer Rickel; The book of small treasures, by Christine Klocek-Lim; and Still, by Deborah Burnham. Feel free to spread the word!

4/19 update: We've surpassed 25 comments, which means two more chapbooks are up for grabs: Round Trip, collaborative poems by Kevin McLellan and fifteen poets, and Notes from the Red Zone, by Christina Pacosz. Thanks for spreading the word, y'all.

4/24 update: Keep the comments coming! With 30 folks responding, I'm adding a copy of Matthew Hittinger's Platos de Sal.

On top of everything...

. . . On top of everything else I have to get done, I'm throwing my hand in with the poets for the month of April. Yep, I'm gonna try to write (and post) a poem a day for this year's NaPoWriMo. I'll try to get 'em up during my lunch hour (no guarantees) and ::bloop:: they'll vanish from the blog by midnight.

If you've never heard of NaPoWriMo, click here. There's still time to join us!

Winter boarder: begonia grandis

Winter boarder: Begonia grandis bulbils sprouting from a pot of dieffenbachia that I kept outside all summer and fall and overwintered in the laundry room. I'm always astonished at the capacity of this plant to propagate from the tiniest, most negligible-looking bulbil: some are smaller than a BB; some grow to maybe pea-sized. And all of them--all of them, if given half a chance (tossed nonchalantly into this pot, for example, not planted with any purpose or worry about light or water), will grow.

What you don't see here is the gorgeous deep pink of the leaves' underside, a large part of what makes them so beautiful all summer and fall in the garden: the afternoon light through the leaves is spectacular. The plants don't blossom until late in the year, and though the flowers are worth the wait--deep pink, cascading from multibranched stems--it's the leaves that make this hardy begonia a standout in the shade beneath our crabapple tree, in the shade beneath the pines, in the narrow alley between our house and the neighbors' where there is literally only a two-inch-wide space to dig in between our flagstone and their sidewalk. It also performs well in full sun, as long as its base is well-mulched.

These tiny plants are up early: they're the last to arise in the outdoor garden, later even than the notoriously is-it-still-there-or-not balloon flowers. When this small, they're easy to tease out of the soil and pot up in their own containers, though lately I've come to play more with companion planting: christmas cactus cuttings interplanted with an ornamental pepper; spider plants in the same pot with the bushy poinsettia that I've kept going for three years now; and (later, once it's safe to garden outside again) heartsease and oregano in the giant pots we use for growing tomatoes.

Air Empathy

On the red-eye from Seattle, a two-year-old
in the seat behind me screeches

his miniature guts out. Instead of dreaming
of stuffing a wad of duct tape into his mouth,

I envy him, how he lets his pain spurt
into the open. I wish I could drill

a pipeline into the fields of ache, tap
a howl. How long would I need to sob

before the lady beside me dropped
her fashion rag, dipped a palm

into the puddle of me? How many
whimpers before another passenger

joined in? Soon the stewardess
hunched over the drink cart, the pilot

gushing into the controls, the entire plane:
an arrow of grief quivering through the sky.

:: Jeffrey McDaniel, The Endarkenment

This and that

Today's the last day to nominate a blog post for 3 Quarks Daily's Arts & Literature Prize. Full details here.
~
Day Two of spring break:

• essays graded: 0
• chapbook review copies addressed & ready to ship: 10
• copies ready to ship to buyers (thank you!) and entrants (thank you!): 15
• new chapbook covers designed: 2
• inches of new snow received: 0
• hours till we finally get to see Avatar: 3
• spending my Sunday as I choose for once: priceless

Talc

When you phoned I was far, and sleeping,
but they brought me the message and I ran,
I ran to the phone where you were,
you were speaking, we two were speaking,
when I ran back to the room I no longer
knew we would speak again. Twenty minutes
and I was gone, there was a plane,
and another, there was a friend who took
me to you, you were asleep. I didn't know
there was still any question, I only learned
later, everything later, weeks later I was
still frightened of all that I learned.
I swear though I knew it was there I scarcely
saw the hose taped to your mouth, its ridges
that breathed in case you did not; scarcely saw
the twin tubes coming out of your chest or
the blood running through them and into the pump
that returned to your wrist, quietly, steadily,
what belonged there. The slenderer tubes
that entered the side of your neck I scarcely
noticed; not the empty ones waiting for something
not needed, not the ones drawing fluids
from three labeled bags. They had washed you,
I barely noticed the yellow stains and the blood
that remained on your skin. They had cut you,
I did not see the bandages holding the length
of the chest, they lay where I should have been
lying, I did not understand. I did not see
the wounds on your side where some scalpel or saw
had been dropped or some heated or iced tool
had burned. The monitor's chiming ws nothing,
someone would come, they would turn it off.
The slash stapling the crease of your thigh was
nothing. When the nurse turned the white valve
near the collarbones' nest before opening one
on the wrist, there was not one cell of my body
that needed to understand. I barely felt the bars
where my hand fitted into your hand, the rail
that days afterward still tracked my cheek.
The urine that drained to the sack below us must
have been warm, I must have touched it, I should
have known it was warm wih your warmth but I did not.
I waited. I knew the sweetness I smelled
on your body was powder, was baby powder, I did
not understand, but I knew they had given you back
to this world for a second time and I waited
for you to agree. I waited for you to open your eyes,
a first time, another, another. I waited until
you were sure, until every part of you stayed.

:: Jane Hirshfield, in Five Points 1:3 (1997)

Thankful

Two things that happen to be going on at the same time this week seem to have overlapped, at least emotionally, in my (what? mind? heart is more like it)--in me.

First, I've been making the rounds in my department, getting letters of recommendation lined up for the necessary and energy-consuming job application process. I'm currently in my third year of a one-year visiting contract: I love what I'm doing and where I'm working, but there's no hope of it becoming a permanent gig. Reality looms.

And second, I'm shooting PDF copies of a chapbook by one of our upcoming Seven Kitchens authors to a few folks who have generously agreed to write blurbs.

I know that writing a blurb is nothing like writing a letter of recommendation. I've done a few of both, though, and I can tell you that to me they feel much the same: in the end, I always feel that (a) I could have done a better job and (b) the friend/colleague/student should have picked someone else (because that someone else could have done a better job).

As for being on the receiving end, the truth is that I come unraveled when anyone says something truly thoughtful, positive, and supportive about my work. You might not think that a Leo should have such difficulty with praise, but I do. I lose it for a moment--a brief moment, like today when I saw the letter a generous colleague had written for me: I had myself a good, quick cry and then, with a scant ten minutes left to prepare for class, I pulled my act together like Mama Rose and threw myself into what I do, sometimes, almost as well as the man described in that letter.

As I said in a quick message to our author mentioned above, it's very good to have such good friends, mentors, colleagues. And I want to thank them--hers, mine, and yours--all of you out there, trying to do what we do as well as we can do it. My life has been so enriched, and I am truly grateful for every gesture, large and small, that all of you have made to help hold someone else up, keep someone going, keep someone teaching and trying and writing and growing.

Just that: one enormous thank you, too huge for me to accommodate in words (see above), but if I could--if I could stay conscious of this feeling and inhabit it with intention, maybe you might could imagine a thank you as constant and quiet and present as your next breath. And the next one. That's me, giving thanks. To you.

Lone Star: all points done

I finished piecing the central star in R's Lone Star quilt a few days ago. I settled on a blue fabric for the setting pieces: a reproduction Lancaster blue that we got at the PA quilt show in Harrisburg a couple years ago. I'd been saving it--now I know for what.

Most of the setting pieces are attached to the central star now; I only need two squares and one half-square triangle. I'm paper-piecing these as well, and they're kind of floppy and ungainly to work with, but it seems the right approach since I'm butting them against rows of paper-pieced diamonds with the backing still intact and basically joining like parts together.

I pieced four small Lemoyne stars to center in the four setting squares, and have appliqued two of these in place so far. With any luck, I may get the other two finished this week and the three remaining blue pieces attached. At that point, I'll need to decide on borders. I'm thinking a triple border would look great. We'll see.

Here's the second small star I was appliqueing two nights ago; you can really see the Lancaster blue fabric too (I'll take pics of the whole top once it's ready for borders--soon, I hope):

Bibliomancy

Click here to read a fine poem by Miriam Greenberg over at 42opus . . .

Classes started yesterday. I'm teaching three days a week instead of five--hooray--and hope to get some writing done at home on Tuesday mornings. Today I've been playing catch-up with the press. Trying to get completely back on schedule by the end of the month. It'll be tight, but I think we can do it.

We've been fortunate to have missed the heavy snows that socked so many others. I've warned my morning class to check the college's web page on rough weather days--I won't drive through that for a one-hour class--so of course they're probably rooting for heavy weather. Even in poor driving conditions, I think I can make the commute in time for my afternoon classes, though I'm still not crazy about being out in sleet or heavy snow. Of course this is all hypothetical so far--no actual winter storms yet. Even my holiday trip to Cincinnati went without delay. Lucky, lucky.

On Thursday, I'm attending an all-day workshop at the Writing Center at Bucknell, "Integrating Writing and Learning Across the Curriculum" with Katy Gottschalk and Keith Hjortshoj. Looking forward to that.

Over on Facebook, a recurring meme is making its rounds again: the one where you grab the nearest book, turn to page 54 and post the 5th sentence on the page. I'd forgotten how fun this random selection can be. Not exactly bibliomancy, but mild fun for anyone who loves language and accident's potential . . .

Lone Star update

I took the Lone Star quilt top along to Cincinnati and was able to make some progress: three of the "arms" are finished now, and I've started "auditioning" background fabrics. A darker print seems appropriate--I had been thinking about blue, but this one looks nice:

The photo was taken with my cell phone, so the quality's not the best.

Last night's Cold Moon

Winter boarder: bay tree

December 1: time to bring the bay tree indoors for the winter.

It does take up a pretty big corner of the kitchen, but there's nothing like fresh-from-the-tree bay leaf.

Reevaluating my facile relationship with Nature, or: The first few baby spiders in the laundry room looked so cute until I glanced up--

--and saw multitudes dangling from their invisible threads and realized they were already in the laundry basket so I threw everything back into the dryer and set it on high then caught as many of the tiny critters as I could in an upturned broom and set it outside in the cold (forgive me) before backing out of the laundry room feeling all prickly and freaked out and brushing myself all over . . .







It's really us or them.

fabric search!

When I last visited my folks in August, I taught Mom how to paper-piece a six-point star and hexagon: six of each, when combined, make up a block that I was working on. I didn't know yet what to do with these blocks; they were just fun to make and I had a vague notion that they'd make a nice star quilt.

It turns out that, like most quilt patterns I come up with, someone has done it before. Which is fine--it's wonderful, actually, because I'm very drawn to traditional quilting and patterns. The blocks I was making are the basic units for a Seven Sisters quilt.

But they're quite variable, as well: Mom and I came up with four or five variations, sitting at the kitchen table and moving the paper diamonds and hexagons into different combinations. I cut out a big batch of each from the subscription cards I'd taken from her magazines (these cards are the ideal weight for paper-piecing and I'm always saving them) to start Mom off, and before I left to come back home, she'd already finished her first block (and she'd done a very good job, despite her initial misgivings of "Oh, that's too hard; too many pieces").

Which brings us to the fabric search. Here's the basic block that I showed her how to make:

And here is the block variation that she came up with:

Doesn't it look like a snowflake? And completely different from the first pattern. I've been making mine with yellow or white stars in the center surrounded by dark or medium blue hexagons to emphasize the stars. By repeating the diamond points, she's extended the center star into a more complex crystal shape.

The problem is with the first block: she needs more of the center blue to finish off the outer points on that block. We think that maybe I gave her the blue that she started out with, so I've been searching to see if I have any more of it--so far, without any luck. Does anyone out there have a 6 x 8 inch piece of this blue fabric? Here's a closeup, and thanks very much:

Quilt project: Lone Star

A few pics of the Lone Star quilt top I'm making for R. I'm using an old method, English paper piecing, which basically involves basting each piece of fabric onto a small paper cutout (in this case, little diamond shapes) and then sewing each diamond into place. As each concentric row is completed, the basting thread is removed from the previous row and the paper backing is picked out. In the close-up below, you can see the center eight-point star, the green second row, the third row (a reproduction shirting cotton), and a bit of the fourth row, which still has its basting stitches in:

To photograph the quilt top, I pinned it to a white whole-cloth quilt that Randy made a few years ago. It looks awesome against all that quilting!

But still a ways to go. I try to get in a half-hour of piecing each night. The finished quilt should be about the size of the white one it's pinned against (or roughly 40 x 40 inches):

These photos were taken October 10th. I'll post another pic soon that I took on November 10th. Making slow but steady progress . . .

Dear Wordsworth

While taking a brief respite from grading, I scanned some of the lower bookcase shelves for a few more poetry books to donate to the library. Found an old copy of William Hathaway's The Gymnast of Inertia, published by LSU in 1982, and of course I had to skim through it before putting it in the "go" pile. Here's a poem for all you fellow teachers:

DEAR WORDSWORTH

I liked your poems "Michael," "We Are Seven,"
and "Idiot Boy" very much, even when
the teacher read them aloud and cried
and blew her nose. "Tintern Abbey" is really neat,
though I don't understand it. I did a walk-
athon for March of Dimes once. I hate your poem
"Daffodils." Ha-ha, that's just a joke,
I just don't know better because of television.
Seriously, why did you become such a crusty,
old poo-poo? Professor Borck at the university
says you got tired of not being rich. My
dad says poor people are happy being poor
because God loves everyone--even poets. I
think it would be romantic to have a French
girlfriend and a dopefiend for a best friend.
I can hardly wait until my creepy sister
goes to college and I can have her room.
My best friend is Veralee Broussard and I can
talk about anything with her. I wish you
could tell me what it's like to be dead.
It would feel neat to lie in a cozy coffin
underneath the flowers and know everything.
Really, you rot and go to heaven or hell.
Well, this is almost two hundred words, so
I have to go. Tomorrow we read Amy Lowell.
Mrs. Curtis says she smoked cigars!

Matthew Siegel has a new website

and here it is!

Is it Mercury?

I heard somewhere that Mercury was retrograde; maybe that's the reason for all the idiots on the road lately--have been in a couple of really close calls with drivers who suddenly veered into my lane or glanced up from their cell phone chatter just in time to NOT rear-end me. C'mon, people. Pay attention out there. If I could teleport to Williamsport (oh, now I feel pressured to keep rhyming) I'd do it, but meanwhile it's back on the road where usually my main worry is stray deer.

Well, I shopped around a bit online and then went out tonight & blew a gaping hole in the 7KP budget, an act I hope I don't regret. We needed a printer, a good, dependable, total-access laser printer. So now we have one. It's still in the box: a Canon something-or-other. I'll clear space for it this weekend. And yes, we'll gladly accept donations (of any size) to help replenish the budget. Buy a chapbook! Buy two! Support our independent micropress!

We're still tinkering with the cover, but Erin Bertram's Inland Sea is on schedule to come out this month. Can hardly wait: wonderful poems.

Ugh, midnight. I'm a pumpkin. Night night, y'all.

Back to the blog

I'm still here: juggling teaching, grading, commuting, and the myriad tasks that come with the press. I need to head off to my next class in six minutes. Just ate a sandwich at my desk from the little coffee stand downstairs--I was going to make a sandwich but the bread had gone bad, something I didn't notice until after taking a bite, ewww. I need to head off to class in four minutes. Last night I tried to preserve some Japanese maple leaves by pressing them between waxed paper layers with a warm iron; I'm not sure it worked because the edges are curling up; I may try again tonight. It's a long winter to go without leaves. Three minutes till class time. We (the press) lost a significant benefactor today; I'm trying to roll with it but I'm not sure yet what the impact will be. Two minutes: time to gather my papers and notes. R just texted me that he found a recipe for kim chee chicken: I'm game. And it's showtime, and I'm off--

Cabbage

You planted cabbages to please me,
I know.
And there the last three or four of them clung
like pock-marked green moons in orbit
across the muddy sky of the garden slope.

We had to get out the hatchet
to chop the woody stem off the one I wanted.
And then I pulled off leaf after leaf,
each rubbery jacket bull's-eyed
like cigarette burns on an unfortunate table,
where slugs had tried to burrow in.

Before I brought it inside for a good scrub
I hacked off
half-a dozen leaves with my pocket knife
and flung them onto the compost heap,
flicking slugs off,
lacking the zeal even to deprive
them of their disgusting lives.
Autumn is here, and where
is the gardener's thoroughness
that would have been mine in March or May?

The essence of cabbage
as I chopped through its crunchy thickness
on the kitchen counter
was what the word October
smells like.
That pure white-and-greenness
that filled my head
with what grows and keeps on growing
was what I had needed all this
short and getting-shorter day.

:: Richard Tillinghast, The New Life