NaPo Blogroll

So many suckers brave souls are attempting NaPoWriMo this year. Can you write a poem a day for a month?

Some of the participants:

Rik of The Rik Files
Cookala of Cheesecloth Moon
Harry of Heraclitean Fire
Liz of Blue Sky Tavern posting at Blue Sky Views
Mike of the Formal Blog and Sonnetarium
Jee Leong of Song of a Reformed Headhunter
Rob of Surroundings
Eloise of Cake or Death?
Scavella of Scavella's Blogsphere
Hannah of Awake at Dawn on Someone's Couch
Dick of The Patteran Pages might be giving it a try
Kult of sugar-coated pencils
David of Dummy
Chad of Freak Machine Press
Amanda of A Teeny Tiny Blog
David of The April Project 2006
Shanna of Shanna Compton's Blog
Suzanne of litwindowpane
Steve of Oh Sweet Death Come For Me
Jessica of LookTouchBlog
Jen of Fringe Matters
Mathias of Yes, Starlings! Yes!
Hedgie of The Jackdaw's Nest
Ivy of Ivy is Here
SB of Watermark
Erin of Vivid

And then there are those who are going above and beyond, poets with talent and drive beyond mere mortals. These few who are doing two poems a day for the month:

Reen of st*rnosedmole
Shafer of I'll Show You Mine

Plus many more as I track them down (or they take pity on me and tell me. Hint hint).

I cannot deny it, I have Austin Scarlett hair

I saw myself in a mirror. It's true. It's Austin Scarlett's hair.

I don't have his makeup, though. I could, but I don't.

Bloggers after my own tarry heart

You know a blog is worth reading if a reader comments: "Your shriveled little hearts must be made of tar."

Yes, I believe they are, but that's what makes Go Fug Yourself such fun for the mean-spirited among us. We know who we are.

Julias have to stick together

I'm taken with these lines by Julia Cohen:

The endeavor always
ends in anonymous:

bedfellows and cadavers.

I just want to say that out loud, repeatedly.

I believe this is a first

I did my taxes and now feel better.

If that isn't a first, it should be.

Bring on NaPo!

But in the meantime, check out Seth Abramson's Royal Society. I know a few people who are royal pains in the ass. Does that count?

2006 sucks

Home finally.

The procedure, whatever in the hell it is, apparently went fine. Of course, it went fine three previous times, so who the hell knows?

Yoinks, I am a crankypants.

I need to read a good poem. Writing a good poem is completely out of the question. NaPo is going to kick me to the curb.

Another surgery

Yep.

Is it too late to sacrifice myself to some really bloody god to get out of this?

Today's soundtrack includes Dean Martin

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

Steve's wrist. Yeah, what more needs said? More doctor visits. More infection. Possibly more surgery.

A couple of other poems

Gabriel pointed me to Jessica Murray's poem, but we don't agree about Jure Kaštelan's Parting at Three Candles. I think it's lovely. He thinks it's meh, at best.

I fell absolutely in love with Daniel Khalastchi's Poem: (With It We Bury) in the most recent New Hampshire Review. The audio file depressed me.

Kelli Russell Agodon's In the 70’s, I Confused Macramé and Macabre is a strange favorite. It's very artificial, but somehow very meaningful for me. I felt I shouldn't like it the way I do like it.

This isn't a specific poem, but Sunspinner links to poems in other journals that they find admirable. I find Sunspinner admirable. It's all chock full of admiration!

Jessica Murray

Gabriel pointed me to a poem in 32 Poems Magazine by Jessica Murray: Elegy for Summer.

I think it's beautiful.

I need to start pimping some of the other great poems I've read lately, including ones at Kaleidowhirl, Sunspinner, New Hampshire Review, and Three Candles.



Edited to add: She used "gelid," though. Is that allowed?

Sick as dog

Dying commencing or preferred.

Send flowers to funeral.

Meantime, peruse Duotrope.

If I believed in guilty pleasures

I would be experiencing one right now. Aerosmith's "What It Takes." Really really loud. Yes, I'm singing along. One of the major pleasures of listening to Steven Tyler is screaming along. Another of the major pleasures of listening to Steven Tyler is not seeing Steven Tyler, who is not a handsome man.

In the pink

+



=



Ask me how I know.

In stitches

Steve's stitches are out. Again.

Dr. Voodoo is a nice man, but I'm sicksicksick of his face!

I ate deep fried cauliflower for lunch. It is a coworker's 20th anniversary with the company (wow) and I was sent to pick up pizzas. I was unable to resist the cauliflower. I tell myself it's a vegetable, but it's about as healthy as bacon-wrapped lard.

Good exercise

Hannah over here points to Jack over there with a neat poetic exercise hither and thither. Yon is in the tub, with God.

Have I finally found a plus in Steve's disability?

The cardiology section of my training is like this: *snapsnap*.

Why are so many cardiologists Indian? I'm not complaining, mind you. I can't think of any accent or set of accents I find more reassuring and soothing than the various Indian accents. That's pretty weird considering that cardiologists are so rarely saying pleasant things when Steve's around. Hmm.

Soup for you!

My recipes involve a lot of eyeing and guesswork, so you'll want to take these amounts as suggestions rather than absolutes.

Reuben soup:

8-10 oz of corned beef
small amount of butter or oil
1 small onion
1 cup well-drained sauerkraut
3 cups beef stock
8-16 oz swiss cheese, shredded

either:
8 oz brick of cream cheese or
roux


Saute the corned beef and onion in the butter/oil in the bottom of a saucepan. You just want to release some of the great flavors in the onion. Add the stock and the sauerkraut. Simmer for 10-20 minutes until the flavors blend. Turn down heat. Stir in the swiss cheese until melted. Thicken with some cream cheese or roux. Can be topped like french onion soup with a slice of rye bread and some swiss.

Odds and ends

Still no consensus on whether we're despicable.

A Disintegrating Clone has words for the editor of Pebble Lake Review.

Have you been to Bitch | Lab? Try it.

Harry is perplexed by American religiosity. Me too, Harry. Me too.

And have you any itty bitty ditties? Remember Snakeskin.

The Diagram

Read the submission page for The Diagram.

We enjoy traditional forms. We eschew traditional forms. We lie. Send us annotations, schematics, poems, sentence diagrams, definitions. Make us love you.

Now that's a submission page. Hot damn.

No rhyming poems, please

So, because of Rob and Gabriel, I am still off my duff and did some spelunking around to see if I wanted to submit more poetry elsewhere. A number of places said "No rhyming poems."

Actually, it's a little more snide than that, like this example from Pebble Lake Review:

We do not accept rhyming poetry, greeting-card verse, poems about vampires, etc.

Classy.

Oh well. I suppose I'm grateful for having my choices limited, since my energy is a little suspect. But frankly, this sort of thing is one of the reasons I've never bothered to submit in the first place. Hard to work up a head of steam when you write the equivalent of vampire poems.

Off my duff

Rob's post about Snakeskin got me to submit something. Maybe this will be the start of a new phase in my life where I get off my duff and pursue publication.

God, it would be so much easier if I could be a superpoeticgenius and editors would come to me. Ha!

Oh, and if you go to Rob's blog, congratulate him on his commended poem in the UK National Poetry Competition.

Poetry sorts, sorted and sordid

A few weeks ago, I commented on liking a few poems in an online journal, and I mused over whether each of the named editors liked each of the published poems.

Why do I wonder? Because I'm again wondering about poetry genres, and poetic touchstones.

You go to a bookstore. You want to buy a book. The books are grouped according to genre. Imagine simply being pitched into the bookstore with no groupings. Imagine the books have no dust-jackets. How would you figure out what to read? Genres are defined by the publisher based on the expectations of the reader.

Poetry is never going to work that way, I recognize. But I also think that the diversity in poetry is something of a barrier. It isn't closeminded to have preferences. It isn't wrong to lean toward certain aesthetics and away from others. Too often, I've seen poets or critics getting a label of rigidity or one-trick-ponyness or parochial attitudes though, of course, it can matter where the tastes of the accuser and the accused lie.

Fiction is generally defined by its plot more than its style. That's an impossible task for poetry. How many poems aren't about death or love in some way? How many poems actually have a plot? Some do. Some would if we knew what the poet was thinking. Some simply don't and never will.

Some objective categorization is possible, certainly. We can see if a poem is in a form, even a nonce form, or is free verse, or is a prose poem. We can see if a poem is long or short, if it's enjambed or endstopped, if it's got initial caps or none, if it's left-justified or not. Still objectively, we can say if it has imagery, if it's written in "standard" grammar, if it contains allusions to other work.

The addition of biography or author commentary can help further objective categorization. Eras, sex, schools, influences, references, even careers.

Subjectively, we can categorize further. But though we can say that a poem is fresh or surreal or cliched or too long or too short or boring or sad or exciting, how can my saying that mean anything to you unless you know what I mean by any of those terms? To know what I mean, you have to know me, and once you know me, do you need to know what I mean? If I say "read this" and I'm someone whose taste you admire (you fool!) then I don't need to defend it. If I'm someone whose taste you abhor (smart person) then I can't defend it. (For example, I read Roger Ebert's movie reviews because I know that he will review things in a consistent way. I won't necessarily agree with his rating, but I can extrapolate, from my knowledge of his previous reviews, whether I'll consider a movie worth seeing.)

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that differentiation in poetry is subjective and personality-driven. So what?

Well, the sheer number of poems written prevents there from being an Ebert, or even a dozen Eberts. A handful of poets can get Ebertized, but the rest are relatively obscure. I might recognize a name you don't, and even more likely you'll recognize a name I don't. And neither of us knows what the other knows.

I think if poets, or poetry readers, want to increase readership of our favorite artform, we need to lower this barrier, not by limiting publication or changing journals or zines, but through reportage. Who I am influences what I like. If you've liked what I've liked, chances are better you'll continue to like what I like.

This is where, I hope, the strengths of the internet come into play, and this is where my project starts. Stay tuned!

Tinker, tinker, tinker, spy

I just got done tinkering with another internet gadget, this time so you can see what links other people follow.

Of course, after tinkering with it for however long, I wonder why anyone would be interested. Then I realize that if I'm on a blog, I'm interested to know what other readers are interested in.

I told you I was a sheep. Baa.

We're despicable and our mommies dress us funny!

Over at 32 Poems there's a discussion about poetry blogging, and whether writing a blog is "despicable."

My husband thinks so. As much as I love him, sometimes he's completely insane.

If you don't join, you can't mock

Steven Schroeder has created a NCAA tournament pool just for poets.

I am wildly incompetent at such things, but I joined. I'm a joiner.

Yay me?

I got my first assessment back from my course, and I got a 98%. That's a great score.

Why, then, do I feel so let down by it? Almost angry. Frustrated. Nauseated. I'm upset and I don't know why. I don't think I expected a higher score. I wish I understood my own brain sometimes.

On another front, I decided to try workshopping again. I picked a poem that's a bit of a departure for me, mostly because I couldn't tell if it was worth working on. I became more than slightly freaked out by that, too, but that's my normal reaction to workshopping. I am a jittery, jittery soul.

This blogrolling thing is hard

I read too many blogs and I link to too many blogs and there are still others I haven't linked to yet and I'm completely disorganized and I think I broke my brain.

If you know I hang out at your blog and stare at you but I don't have a link to you, it's almost certainly because you have cooties. But it could be that I don't know that I don't have a link to you, and you don't know that I don't know that I don't have a link to you. Until now.

My doctor doesn't listen

I really don't like him. At all. He pays no attention to anything I say.

But I need to go four times a year to get my Depo shot, so in I go. I try to tell myself that he ignores me because he's an ESL speaker, which is brutally unfair to other ESL speakers who don't ignore me, but it's my attempt to cope with a doctor I dislike.

I know what you're thinking. Why don't I get a different doctor? Because the one doctor I know I like is my husband's, and I have a weird distaste for seeing my husband's doctor. Besides, he's not a gynecologist. As far as I know.

Cobalt

Cobalt

Blue is white. A pinch of cobalt turns
the weave of yellow fiberglass to snow.
Like veins in pallid wrists, no one discerns
the brittle gleam of blue too far below
the shiny surface. Skin is almost glass:
too blue or pretty and the surface cracks
with ice or brittle chemistry. We're past
the days of arsenic or lead; our tracks
lead off to melanoma from the sun
that makes us brown. And still the gasps of blue
depleted veins scream out for oxygen,
and still the pretty fibers break in two
so glass can pierce the skin and welcome red,
that in its turn can turn us blue and dead.

The breeze displeases only when I sneeze

My office door is rattling on its hinges, and I'm about to go all berserker on HDA. This Monday has spurred my righteous wrath!

How can it be that warm out there with such a frosty breeze in here?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

Yes, this may be the start of a new obsession.

LibriVox is really neat.

I'm trying to resist. Must. Resist.

Volunteers read short works or individual chapters of public domain works for others to download. I'm trying to convince Steve to do it. He's got the most soothing voice I've ever heard. What do you mean, I'm biased? Never! Okay, a little.

But if you could just hear him say the word "ruin," you'd giggle. Rooeen. Rooeen.

I ran across a guy who does voiceover work

And it made me wonder what it would be like, hiring someone to read you work. He does audiobooks, fiction, but it would be neat to hear my words come out of a professional talker's mouth.

Two more book reviews

The Castlemaine Murders, by Kerry Greenwood. 4 stars.

This Old Souse, by Mary Daheim. 1 star.

All I want out of life

Is a clip from the Muppet Show.

Charles Aznavour singing "Inchworm." That song is haunting me, has been for the past couple of days. There's a clip somewhere in the world with Muppets singing "Two and two are foooour. Four and four are eeeeeiiight."

Okay, I'll I want is a clip from the Muppet Show and a cold Diet Coke. Oh, and a healthy Steve. Wait. I'll come in again.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Steve's procedure didn't go very well yesterday. Right now, I don't have any idea if his wrist is going to heal, or what the next step is if it doesn't.

I do know that I am becoming progressively more freaked out as 2006 continues.

I'm eating a Bob Evans roll. That comforts me.

Gird your loins

Because it's less than a month until NaPoWriMo--National Poetry Writing Month. One poem a day for a month. Gird! Gird!

PFFA hosts a forum for the NaPo'ing. Of course, you can just NaPo on your blog, or NaPo on a log, or NaPo with some grog, or NaPo in a fog.

But it's fun to NaPo in a crowd. It's fun to NaPo right out loud.

Great. I'm a book I dislike.

Virginia Woolf: Orlando. You are a challenge, for

outer events, the outside world, the time

etc. play no importance to you. Your focus is

in writing, in gender issues, and inside your

own head. Self-analysis and exploration of

yourself as well as the outer world hold

great importance to you.


Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit

It's deja vu as we sit and wait for the phone call for Steve to go in and have surgery on his wrist. I feel the urge to bite someone.

And I'm getting a cold.

And I haven't written anything in days.

And I only have one more Diet Coke in the fridge.

And the transcription I was working on involved a doctor who was giggling to himself the whole time.

All in all, a bad day to stop sniffing glue.

I can't believe it

Steve has to have another procedure on his wrist.

I feel sick.

Have you gone and stared at Rik today?

Because he's writing things that are worth reading, even if I think he's approaching certain problems from entirely the wrong angle.

The only way you can appear infallibly wise...

... is never to speak.

Sure, if people are talking, attempting to come to grips with something like poetry, they'll eventually say something stupid. And if they never speak it, they'll have thought it. The alternative is to stop thinking.

Knowledge doesn't come about by being right all the time. It comes of making mistakes and learning from them.

Breathing

I was reading a chapter on the pulmonary system and kept yawning and gasping and generally overthinking my breathing.

I started doing that with poetry years ago, and have never recovered. There's a reason it's called inspiration.

You wouldn't expect athletes to die young

Even roly-poly athletes.

Kirby Puckett didn't mean as much to me as some other players, but it's still a sick feeling in my gut hearing of his death, just as it was a sick feeling hearing of his forced retirement. Did he deserve to be in the Hall? No one should begrudge him now.

So long, Kirby.

Popperian poetry

If it can't be falsified, if it can't go wrong, if there is no point where you can say, "This was a mistake" or "This was brilliant" is it poetry?

I have been accused of heckling

Thomas of The Pangrammaticon thinks I was heckling Flarf.

If I'm heckling anything, it's my own inability to grasp what the ruckus (it's a small ruckus, more of a ruckette) is all about.

I'm not having a negative reaction to the positive feelings that go with Flarf. I'm simply confused. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have a negative reaction if I had a clue, but I think the clue needs to come first. Right now, Flarf appears to be "found poetry collage" with as little sense as possible.

In the interests of gaining a clue, I am reading Dan Hoy's essay here.

I do wonder, though. If I were heckling, would it matter?

I got played

I got played for a sucker by a cretin and criminal.

Nothing bad happened. No one got hurt, no thanks to me.

I'm too damned cynical to be so damned trusting.

Book review: Pardonable Lies

Historical mystery Pardonable Lies, by Jacqueline Winspear reviewed here. I gave it 3 stars, which was generous considering my apathy.

I listened

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was a little afraid to listen to the poem I fell in love with at the New Hampshire Review. The poem sneaked up on me. The reading, well, I listened. The poet sounds so young, so tired, and it's fitting and heartbreaking. The poet's reading conflicted with my own. Who wins? In my head, I will. In the world, there is only the poem, and only the poet reading it aloud.

I listened. It was a good choice. But I am more alienated from the poem than I was. Listening turns the poet into the other.

What the fluck is flarf?

RJ is talking about it. Seth is talking about it. Other people on my blogroll have been mentioning it. RJ says there is a collection here but I thought it was satire. I have no clue. I read their posts. I gape a little. I breathe through my mouth. I shake my head.

Is this one of those "you'll know it when you see it" dealies?

Literary lust?

Rob links to a poll about hot literary characters.

I'm not confessing anything. But I will say that for me, it's someone who's a little short and wears his facial hair in whiskers.

Living with disability

I've writtne a lot of poems about mortality, mostly because of Steve's health. But I've never really written about disability, though his disability is probably the single biggest stress in my life.

When I think about writing about it, or really touching on it, it just feels wrong, like whining. I can write Death but can't write Sick or Broken.

This post wasn't going to be about poetry. It was going to be about living with disability. But I guess that's simply something I can't talk about. The proof is deep in this pudding.

Audio poetry files

I've done a couple of poetry sound files for the blog and over at pffa they are considering adding links to sound files. I'm for it.

What's funny is that I found a poem the other day that had an audio option, and I'm afraid to listen to it. The poem is wonderful the way it is. I've created my own "sound file" of it in my noggin, and I'm a little afraid to mess with it.

I don't know what, specifically, I think would happen. Back when I was a contributing member to the poetry world, I'd generally read a poem aloud before commenting on it, mainly to hear if there was any sonic play that my eyes might be missing.

But I'm leery of that sound file. I have an excuse. My computer here at work doesn't have a sound card.

Have you ever had your opinion of a poem changed by hearing it read?

Don't blame me if you're missing out

Have you visited The New Hampshire Review yet? I bet you slackers didn't go. How can you call me a crazy damned fool if you don't go prove I'm a crazy damned fool? Jeez. (Funny thing about poems. One of the poems barely made my "like" list, but I haven't stopped thinking about it since I read it. Now it's firmly on my "love" list. And I bet even the people who have known me for ten years online wouldn't be able to guess which one it is. See? A challenge!)

How about the Wiki? Liar! I can see when people post, and you didn't. Don't make me call your state representative and get you outlawed! I'll do it! Don't think I won't!

Did you check out Grapez? The man is snapping his fingers to the bone for you.

Did you clean your room? I think I see some dirt behind those ears!

(I must be adopted. My mother never nags. She suffers silently.)

It's a mystery!

I'm talking too much poetry. I should be talking about one of my other loves: mystery novels. I'm one of those people who tends to have lots of books going at a time, though right now I've limited it to two novels.

Strangely, both are historical mysteries, one set between the wars in England, and the other set in Australia's roaring 20s. That is assuming that Australia's 20s roared. Did everyone's 20s roar?

Neither book is grabbing me by the throat and refusing to let go. Now that I think of it, I haven't read a mystery that really grabbed me in that way since my last Dick Francis. I've been reading mellower fare, like my beloved Laurie R. King.

I saw a Laura Lippman novel in the library a couple of hours ago and nearly hurt myself snatching it from the shelf. Then I realized that I have overdue books leering at me from the bookcase over there. *waves* I really should finish them before I take out new. I really should start them before I take out new. Ah, Laura. Maybe over the weekend. Promise you'll wait!

Home alone

I stayed home from work today. Work was being done on my computer, so I decided to work at home instead.

And I am excruciatingly bored. I rarely get bored, but right now? Wall climbing time. I can't go too far from my desk. There are things I could get done, but I don't wanna. Nothing is an emergency. I'm just sitting here, unable to concentrate, unable to write, or study, or read anything harder than blogposts.

Apparently I stayed home but sent my brain to work. When it comes back, perhaps it will bring lunch.

Headphones

I need a good set.

The ones I have squash my ears against my glasses and make me weep copious tears.

Why is it that even things that feel soft and squooshy end up drilling into your head like diamond? Why?

And why do my hands smell of beer?