A recommendation from a friend: Patricia Smith’s Ethel’s Sestina, and the story behind it, about a man and his mother waiting for rescue during Hurricane Katrina.

During the last week of my mother’s life, I took a steno pad from one of her many stashes of office supplies and started filling it with notes and with the beginning drafts of poems, one which was published a few months later, and others which I will tear apart some other year and use to seed other poems. Perhaps. There’s a legal pad somewhere in my basement with the start of a poem I’d felt compelled to draft maybe nine or ten years ago, knowing I wasn’t going to get very far with it because I would not feel okay about publishing it while my mother was alive, and back then I expected her to live into her nineties (her mother did). There have been poems I’ve written since last spring (”A Stack of Cards” and “Missing Characters“).

(That sentence I just wrote feels so incomplete, but I lack the words to end it properly or definitively. And yes, that could be an analogy to grief.)

So: this entry is to point you to three other poets whose lines about death have recently caught my attention. First, today’s edition of Poetry Daily featured two poems by Jason Shinder, an American poet who died of cancer last year at the age of 52 or 53. The poems are bleakly beautiful (and the subject line of this post comes from “The Good Son”). The Wikipedia entry is startling: it includes a passage that is very unWiki in tone, but strikes me as written in exasperated sorrow.

He was careless with his medication; he was perpetually late to treatment; in the hours before chemotherapy, he could be found ice-skating with a date who didn’t know he was sick.

“We were all maddened by his denial about his illness,” his friend the poet Marie Howe says, “but when we read the poems and his journals after his death, we saw that he had been addressing it in a way he could never say in life.

Second, in a blog entry from earlier this year, Neil Aitken (whose Boxcar Poetry Review has published work by Mary, Jeannine, and me) quotes an interview in which he discusses his preoccupation with themes of exile

merging with the growing realization that my father was dying and that our time together would be very short. I wanted desperately to finish the book for him while he was still alive, and yet even as I was writing and revising, I was gradually sensing the book would not be done in time, and further that there would be poems that could not be written until I had dealt with his impending death.

Third, I’ve been dipping into Laurel Snyder’s The Myth of the Simple Machines during breaks, and oh, there’s a poem in there called “The Truth,” about her and her grandmother:

…She was
horrible, my grandmother,
and that’s the truth, though
my uncle pretended. “She

was a good old girl, just
the dog done lost her bite.”
But no. “But no she

never did,” we told him.
If only she had.

And this, this…

“I love you,” I said to her as she died.

“Yes, but you love lots of people,”
she growled back faintly.
“Not enough,” I should’ve told
her then, “nowhere near.”

Boost #1 (offer expires tonight): No Tell Books is offering a free tarot reading or dream interpretation to you if you purchase a book from them before the end of this weekend (August 9; publisher is based in the Eastern U.S.).

(Sorry this alert is so eleventh-hour-ish, but I’ve been much occupied with other things, so I myself only spotted the offer this morning.)

My connection: one of my poems, “Coat,” appears in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Books - Second Floor. “Because It Makes Me Ha–” appears in the first Bedside Guide. The archives of the online journal include four other poems by me.

A recommendation: Wanton Textiles by Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar, a collection with a beautiful cover and tremendous fun both to read and react to — my copy is covered with my own scribblings (and water-wrinkled from keeping me company in my bathtub), which included the beginnings of two poems eventually published by flashquake.

No Tell’s catalog also includes a collection by Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica.”

Boost #2 (deadline Sept. 1): My friend Dichroic is sponsoring a poetry contest. No entry fee; maximum length = 49 lines; poems must be inspired by “must be inspired by the name of one (or more) of the Lunar maria.” First prize is a year’s membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association (= US$21-$25, depending on where you live).

Murray Mound Pantoum

[Comments disabled due to ongoing barrage of spam-bombs, and because it's Mr. O'Sullivan who should be getting them anyway.]

• I’ve successfully relocated to Nashville, and just need to find a job, and submit everything that’s been rejected since around February, and the dozen or so good poems I wrote in April. Phew. How are you-all doing?
• The first issue of Rat’s Ass Review (for which I designed the website, but have no editorial influence) went up yesterday.
• Also yesterday, the Wallace Stevens Walk was dedicated.
• I love these poems (especially the second one) by Sarah Pape.
• Isn’t Mary’s book cover gorgeous?

Goose Goose Duck

[A revised version of this poem will be published in an anthology by Uphook Press, Fall 2011]

[Written over the past hour or so in response to the "origin" prompt at Poetic Asides. (Props to Jeannine for the pointer!) Hopscotching through some of the other 800+ poems there so far, the one that caught my eye and then stuck with me is Kenji Liu's Because origin is not a place.]

Today’s subject line is from Rose Lemburg’s “Burns at Both Ends,” a poem in the January/February issue of STAR*LINE.

As it happens, the Bronchitis of Doom that plagued me this past winter has pretty much put paid to my ability to get by on little sleep. I’m still grumpily coming to terms with how much less I’ve been able to pursue (never mind finish, never mind circulate) thanks to the combination of more chaos and fewer waking hours that has ensued; on the bright side, I don’t lack for engrossing projects, and I’m expecting the second half of this year to be more conducive to me giving them their due. To each harvest its time.

I’m not personally committing to NaPoWriMo, but I’ll be cheering on the VTL members who are, and I will at least try to show up here a couple times a week with recs or other ramblings. If nothing else, I’ll likely be inspired to stay up an extra hour here and there to get some writing or reading done, so that I’ll have something to share at the party.

Back to STAR*LINE: I am a volunteer for my church’s Room in the Inn program. I had two shifts this past winter where I served as the evening’s “co-host” - basically staying awake and “on call” in case the men needed assistance during the night.

During both shifts, I ended up with time to indulge in some poetry reading. A while back, I’d promised a friend that I would record some Sylvia Plath poems for her, so during my first shift, I had with me an edition of Ariel that included a facsimile of Plath’s typescript as well as a “restored” edition of the book. The publisher used different papers for the different sections (e.g., rougher stock for the fascimile section) — a decision I found pleasing.

The collection includes “Nick and the Candlestick,” a poem Edward Byrne reproduces in his entry on Nicholas Hughes’s death. The YouTube video embedded in his post is a fascinating listen — Seph Rodney introduces his gorgeous reading with how he didn’t really connect to poetry until he came across Plath’s work.

During my second RITI shift, I had with me the issue of STAR*LINE mentioned above. In addition to Lemburg’s poem, the standouts for me included Ann J. Schwader’s “Moonless” (a sonnet), and Robert Borski’s “Hansel & Gretel Revise Their Strategem,” “Jupiter’s Red Spot,” and “The Time Traveler’s Dog.” (Since Borski’s name kept showing up every time I dog-eared a page, I definitely plan to look up more of his work some other evening.)

At Poetry Daily today: Jennifer Atkinson’s “Landscape With Mud Turtle.”

I am sitting in the living room of a beach house overlooking the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which has been traveling past the picture windows at a formidable clip. We had planned to spend the afternoon on the water, courtesy of the owner and her kayaks, but there ended up being a bit of rain and a lot of wind, so here I am reading poetry and scribbling letters instead…

and while I would likely enjoy the poems on the page advertising Carolyn Miller’s forthcoming book regardless of the setting, they fit this place and afternoon very well indeed.

Deborah P. Kolodji recently posted in her blog about the cinquain webzine she edits, AMAZE.

I love the page that explains the name of the journal. Additional pages I’ve bookmarked include another photo of Adelaide Crapsey, Billie Dee’s Beast (from Issue 13), and Carl Sandburg’s tribute to her in “Cornhuskers.”