Month: November 2009

I guarantee whatever story you’re about to tell I have heard a hundred times

I’m having a bad couple of months what with family illness and the stress of a new job and the car accident on 9-11 that gave me pretty severe whiplash, so my online presence has constricted considerably to what seemed necessary, but I’m coming back now. Things are good, too: I’ve discovered Poetry Free-for-all and have written some solid poems. And have been enjoying Discovery and Mutemath (Peg, this is the band Vienna Teng said she was obsessed with) and xkcd and my homegirl Kate Beaton and my new status as one of the world’s most personable editors.

Anyway I have run across some really fine work while I’ve been quiet here:

linkage + linkage

It’s my last night in Jerusalem, and both my physical and mental spaces are crowded with Things I Need To Think More About, never mind the perennially overstuffed closet of Things I Need To Put Into Letters (both alphabetic and correspondential) Sooner Rather Than Later.

But in the meantime, I can at least clear a couple bookmark-threads from my list by mentioning them here…

  • Adrian Matejka’s “Do the Right Thing” (from today’s Poetry Daily); Victoria Chang’s reaction to Matejka’s reported stance on relevance
  • Laura Orem on poetry and collage; Merrie Haskell on using collage as a narrative-development/revision tool; Debi Orton’s Lose the Narrative
  • Blackbird‘s Spring 2008 feature on Lynda Hull – oh, my. I’ve only been through a couple pieces so far — I find reading Hull and reading about her to be like one of those dense, delicious cakes you cannot gobble up frantically if you know what’s good for you. But I am so excited – it includes an audio of Hull reading “The Window,” which is my favorite poem of hers, which I am saving for when I am back on a machine that doesn’t get seizures from a/v files.
  • For years, I held onto the Life magazine I’d bought in some airport at the start of 1990 that included photographs of the Berlin Wall getting sledgehammered by joyful Germans. NYT Op-Ed awesomeness: What Fell Apart, What Came Together