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.

Update: I’ve written a seven haiku, and two short-to-medium-length poems, and one two-and-a-half-page poem. Today I’m going to try my hand at a short narrative poem. We set up a tent in the backyard yesterday, a really tall gazebo-like one, and it’s sunny and warm in Nashville, so I’m going to take my laptop outside and enjoy the weather.

From Luc Reid’s “What Goes Around, Stays Around” (flashfic):

“Mechaieh … the poet?”

“Of course the poet.”

“But I heard that all of her poems turned into flocks of birds when you read them.”

“That’s only her recent ones. This is one of the old ones.”

“So you’ve read it?”

“Of course not. You think I want it to turn into a flock of birds?”

Not much going on with me poetry-wise at the moment, although I’ve got a couple ideas I might try to turn into flocks of birds later tonight, after the roasting of a chicken and napping à la cat. (One of these years I will swing a full night’s sleep before Easter services. This year’s was nice — the readings included two poems by Rilke and one by e.e. cummings — but I confess there were also stretches where I simply let my mind wander, focusing less on the sermon and more on the gorgeous cerulean blue of the thangka (traditional Buddhist painting) behind the pulpit.)

New short-form poetry market microcosms has just published one of my scifaiku as their first-ever piece on twitter. What an excellent way to kick off NaPoWriMo! I haven’t started writing yet, but anticipate spending a lot of time tonight trying my hand at more haiku, both with traditional subjects and speculative ones.

Mirrored from joannemerriam.com.

If I could get all y’all to buy one poetry book in the near future (say, in celebration of spring, or National Poetry Month), at the moment it would be Alison Luterman’s See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions, 2010). Today I quote to you from “The World Card,” which begins:

I always wanted the World card,
naked androgynous figure striding the globe,
adorned with laurel and lightning bolts…

and builds and builds to

…I wanted to cross the sky and come back
bearing dead stars in my hands, fossil fuel
for poems. I wanted to inhale God’s breath
till it singed my lungs; to be used up by love,
to hang from a tree by my heels.
“Be careful,” the old fortune-teller advised me shrewdly
at the shop where I paid her ten bucks
to turn the deck over in her ringed, swollen fingers.
“It’s not always a good thing, you know –”
but I wouldn’t let her finish. I didn’t want good,
good was too small. I wanted the world.

Speaking of Tarot cards, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a new series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot. I associate BPAL with poetry in part because many of the fragrance names and descriptions borrow from Poe, Swinburne, Keats, and others, and the CBLDF series is associated with Neil Gaiman. I should also note that, over the years, I’ve received some incredible responses to BPAL scents on me, and some fond memories (as well as a few “OMG scrub that off NOW!” moments — no risk, no reward) — a vial of “Embalming Fluid” came to the rescue in a too-small ScotsRail compartment after a too-long day sans showers, and there was an elevator ride where a stranger exclaimed “What IS that?” in a happily gobsmacked way in reaction to the Nanny Ashtoreth.

In other news, my sometime partner in crime Greta Cabrel has a new poem up at Thirteen Myna Birds, I have a booklet of hay(na)ku available via Open Hand Press (all proceeds donated to Haiti relief efforts), and last night I read Wendy Babiak’s The Uninvited Guest, thanks to a rec Joanne made on Twitter. (And speaking of Joanne and Twitter, I really like today’s tanka by Peter Newton on 7×20, the zine she edits, which incidentally is open to submissions…)

I’m doing NaPoWriMo again this year. Like last year, I’ll be posting NaPoWriMo inspirational poems here and at my blog, and linking to cool prompts at sites like Read Write Poem. I won’t be posting my poems (I want to be able to submit them for publication later) but I’ll be talking about what I’m working on and how my process is going. And I’ll be tweeting to keep my sanity.

Wendy Wisner’s poems this week at No Tell Motel.

I’ve spent the bulk of my waking hours this week reading about domestic violence. Browsing Wisner’s recent blog entries was a nice moment-thread of counterpoint.

The organizers of 2010: A Space Oddity (mentioned formerly) have sent me a tentative list of their events:

• The Art of Book Covers: A/V Pesentation on how illustration and design come together to create a book cover. *Lou Anders, three time Hugo nominated Editorial Director and Chesley Award Winning Art Director of Pyr Books hosts a presentation on how science fiction book covers are created, from commissioning artists, to art direction, to final layout and design. The presentation will feature artwork from some of the most celebrated names in science fiction and fantasy illustration, including some never seen before pieces.
• A Star Ripped Apart by a Black Hole? *While the evidence for high-mass and low-mass black holes is incontrovertible, whether Nature creates black holes of intermediate-mass (1000 - 10,000 times the mass of the Sun) is still quite controversial. We present work indicating that not only do intermediate-mass black holes exist in the centers of dense globular star clusters, but that in one instance the black hole has ripped apart a star that has strayed too close to it. The unusual chemical signature of the debris suggests the star that was ripped apart was a white dwarf, the stellar corpse of a star that no longer burns hydrogen in its core. (Yuanyan Su presenting the current research of astronomy professor Dr. Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama.)
• Dark visions and bright: SF poetry reading: *The Science Fiction Poetry Association sponsors a reading of speculative poetry (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between). Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny wrote novels to pay the bills, but they wrote poetry because they needed to. Come find out what depths and heights can be fit into just a few well-chosen words. (David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Peg Duthie and Joanne Merriam)
• Mother Goose has a lot to answer for (Reading): *Who killed Humpty Dumpty? Who forced the old woman to swallow the fly? David Kopaska-Merkel reads from his recent book, “Nursery Rhyme Noir.” Shocking crimes lie behind the seeming innocence of nursery rhymes and children’s stories. Fortunately, Hasp Deadbolt, P.I., is on the case.
• Why everybody should be reading Science Fiction: *My father was born before the Wright Brothers flew, and he lived to see the landing on the Moon. That was when change was coming at a snail’s pace. Now we live in a technological avalanche. But people naturally resist change. Someone mentions clones, or the capability to manipulate genetics and we’re automatically opposed. It’s as if these ideas, and others, fell out of the sky. But SF people have spent the last seventy years looking at the various directions we might take, and it helps them make smart choices. Another reason to read SF: At its best, it makes dazzling entertainment. - Jack McDivett
• When Wallpapering the Den with Your Stories is Not an Option: A Q&A on Submission Etiquette: *Writing is one thing, but making it possible for millions of potential fans to read your work is quite another. David Kopaska-Merkel (speculative poet, fiction writer, and editor of Dreams & Nightmares magazine), Peg Duthie (author and editor) and Joanne Merriam (poet, fiction writer and former staffer of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia) answer your questions about submission etiquette and standard practices in the book and magazine industries.
• It’s Time for the Bloodletting (Reading): *Joanne Merriam reads from her short post-apocalyptic story, “Sundowning,” which just appeared in Strange Horizons. Set in a future where vampires keep humans around for food, a fry cook struggles with her father’s Alzheimer’s. Merriam has had fiction in The Fiddlehead, On Spec, Southern Gothic and Stirring, and is a winner of the Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. You can find more of her work online at joannemerriam.com.
• Micro Black Holes and the LHC Scare: Dr. Ben Harms.
• Hanny’s Voorwep: The Rise of the Digital Amateur Astronomer: Dr. William Keel.
• Ask an Astronomer and Physicist: *Do you have questions about space or physics? Well come and enjoy this Q&A on astronomy and physics with University of Alabama professors! Hosted by the Astronomy and Physics departments, Dr. Dean Townsley, Dr. Dawn Williams, and Dr. William Keel will be taking questions from the audience related to astronomy and physics.
• Anthropology in Science Fiction: Exploring the Human Condition through Imagined Worlds: *We will compare portrayals in science fiction to anthropological perspectives on questions such as: What makes a human? Where does our species come from, and where are we headed? How important are the differences that separate us? Can we ever really understand each other? - Dr. Jason DeCaro.
• Sci Fi and Gaming (TP) (45 min) - ABXY
• The Science Fiction of Japanese Anime: *Have a look into the world of science fiction in Japanese anime with the people who brought you the anime convention KamiCon. See how technology in anime affects the path of modern technology, and how modern technology affects anime. Why does the most technologically advanced country in the world find anime so important? - Raymond Lenzer, KamiCon
• War of the Worlds Broadcasting Scare: Adam Schwartz
• Characters, Plot and Backstory: The Mechanics of Fiction: *All too often, the plots and backstories of science fiction and fantasy take precedence over the development of characters. Alex White gives you a series of tips and tricks designed to get you thinking about what drives a story.
• Robotics programing and demonstration: Dr. Monica Anderson and ACM
• How to get rejected: * Editors and their screeners are inundated with manuscripts from people they’ve never heard of. Hundreds of them pour in over the transom every day. So naturally they look for reasons to get rid of them, to send them back with the standard rejection letter. And to do it without having to read past the first page. Or often even the first paragraph. Here’s how we can make it easy for them to reject our submission. - Jack McDevitt

And, I will be selling copies of Edgewise. I got the covers printed yesterday, so I just need to bind them and my pre-orders will be mailed out. I’m still taking pre-orders if you’d like to get in on this hawt chapbook action.

(mirrored from joannemerriam.com)

My favorite poem of hers: Wishes for Sons

Three things:

(1) A surprise package arrived in today’s mail, from my friend Marilyn. Slicing open the bubble-padded envelope and peeling away a thick layer of white tissue paper revealed yet more layers of another, gift-wrap grade tissue paper, tied with a red ribbon and sealed with a store sticker, accompanied by a crisp white envelope with my name in Marilyn’s familiar cursive. Undoing the ribbon and the seal revealed a copy of Mary Oliver’s Owls and Other Fantasies; opening the envelope revealed a handmade card, itself constructed out of both layers present (red and pink paper upon the cardstock) and absent (negative spaces created by wax or some other resist).

I’m looking forward to reading the book some other afternoon. Today I’m just taking time to savor both the surprise and its layers. (Mind, I neither expect nor require it of the presents I receive or give; it simply happens to be a type of pleasure I enjoy lingering with when inclination, opportunity, and means coincide.)

(2) Earlier this week, I was sorting through some snapshots from my trip to Israel last fall. I think I caught sight of this memorial inscription inside the Clore Garden of Science; I don’t recall if the item was a water fountain, sundial, or something else entirely. This is why I ought to caption my photos right away, not half a year later…

From photoblogging

From photoblogging

(3) I don’t know when (or even if) I’ll get to the book itself, but Susan Cheever quoted several intriguing passages from Mary Karr’s Lit when she reviewed it last November:

Humming through me like a third rail was poetry [...] the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight. . . .

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.