Today Jeannine hosts Christine on the Back to the Future blog tour, with everything from small treasures to photogenic hearts.

See the rest of the week:
26 July: Joanne hosts Wendy
27 July: Jeannine hosts Christine
28 July: Wendy hosts Mary
29 July: Mary hosts Jeannine
30 July: Christine hosts me

(Cross-posted from Pantoums and Persistence.)

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

• The first entry for Back to the Future features my interview with Wendy Babiak, the author of Conspiracy of Leaves (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s). Don’t midd the rest of the week, too.
• My “Kroger Koan” appeared last week in Four and Twenty: Short Form Poetry (Volume 3, Issue 7, p.15).
• Four of the poems I wrote during NaPoWriMo got picked up by Stride Magazine: Rabbits on the whole are reluctant to read poetry.
• microcosms has published several of my scifaiku: 1, 2, 3 & 4.
• Third Wednesday published my “Terzanelle for Dominion Beach” (Volume 2, Issue 2, Spring 2010, p. 21).
• Strange Horizons has accepted my poem “Improving on Nature.” I’ll let y’all know when it goes up.

The Back to the Future Blog Tour begins tomorrow at Joanne’s place and moves on each day of the week featuring a new poet and a new host.

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

Pieces published since the last time I posted here:

A Study in Setting at qarrtsiluni (text and audio)

free from school… at tinywords

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

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

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

and

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gam zeh ya’avor

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

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

~ pld

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

I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF - The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan’s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

Via wordweaverlynn: Caleb Emmons’s S _{|{e, s, t, i, n, a}|}

Sheer. Awesomeness.

Hullo-ullo-ullo!

It’s been (and remains) somewhat messy in the county where I (and Joanne) reside. I’m itchy, itchy, itchy, both literally (water shortage) and figuratively (time shortage vs. things I want to write), but very grateful to have escaped the worst. (The baseball field seven blocks from my house was underwater before the Cumberland had even crested.)

Since I last posted here, some new poems of mine have been published:

“dozing April fool…” at 7×20

“She’s building…”, “Here, I’m able…”, and “That giant glass slipper…”, all at microcosms

“The Wailing Well” (text and audio) at Goblin Fruit

Also, two reviews at Galatea Resurrects, issue 14.

Reading has been even more piecemeal and snatched-moment than usual, so not much to say. At the moment, I’m mulling over today’s feature at Poetry Daily, Aliki Barnstone’s With God in the Morning. Some of the language is too prosaic for my taste (and the ending perhaps too abrupt — something about the “dear God” doesn’t work for me, even though I recognize the clever double meaning in its placement there) — but I’m intrigued by the connections the poem wants to trouble me with.

Oh! I must not neglect to mention, there have been poems written for me as well. Molly Gaudry’s Fingertips riffs on some lines from my Sonic Crochet Hook, and for my birthday, a fellow Taurus sent me a verse portrait of a bull.

And on that note, I’m going to go intimidate another 100 endnotes into submission, and then maybe I can treat myself to revising something or other into a submission.

I’ve not been as dedicated to NaPoWriMo this year as I was last year, and as a result I’ve written, so far, ten haiku and five poems (one of which was very very long, but still). It’s day 24 and I don’t think I can write nine poems today to catch up, so I’m admitting defeat. However, it was still worth doing - I wrote five poems and ten haiku! I’ll continue to post the inspirational poems at my blog in case anybody is benefitting from them.

Instead this weekend I’m going to try to finish the transplant story I’ve been picking away at for the past two months, and get at least partially caught up on submissions.

Christian Wiman’s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.