Off to the races

CC got the first batter to hit a weak groundout to Astrocab.

And then the next batter walks in front of Thome.

Who then hits a homerun.

For good or ill, baseball's back!

Would you boo?

Last night, George W threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Braves/Nationals game. It was televised on ESPN and I had wandered away from the TV (not being big on ceremony, myself) and commented in the next room over that he was about to throw out the first pitch. As I was talking to Steve, I could still hear the TV, the boos from the crowd. We went back in and Steve used the TiVo to back up a few seconds.

I wouldn't have booed. My reticence has nothing to do with my affection for Bush and everything to do with my affection for baseball. To me, that's a pairing that I don't want to distinguish with a reaction. Of course, I'm reacting now, but I never claimed to be consistent.

My husband said he would have booed, loud and long. I would have sat, silently, and looked forward to the real reason I was there. The game.

30 minutes to go!

I know that there were already two MLB games, but since I couldn't watch them (heck, they weren't even on TV!) I refuse to count them.

Baseball! Pardon me while I run hyperly around the room and flap my arms. Wheeee!

Baseball scheduling bizarro-land

The Atlanta Braves play their first regular season game tonight in Washington.

They do not play Washington again until April 11.

That's just bizarre.

Minimalism

Jim Murdoch investigates some intriguing minimalist avenues in poetry. Check it out.

I love very short poems, but in a way I don't think minimalism is the engine that drives my car. I just have a short attention span!

I like poems to say a lot in a short space, which I consider is a different aesthetic than wanting a poem to be minimal. Density instead of expansiveness. Not something you can read so much into. Not something you can make what you will. Hmm.

That's just SICK

SICK AND WRONG.

I bought a Kool-Aid-type beverage, the kind in the tiny packets that you put into a bottle and add water. The flavor? Tropical punch (my favorite!)

But when I opened the packet and poured it into the clear bottle, it was obviously SICK AND WRONG.

Clear.

Instead of the beauty of bright red fruitiness, they made clear tropical punch.

I'm tellin' ya, it tastes like despair. And shame.

And because you can never have too much fun with baseball...

fun with baseball

Poetic nature or poetic nurture?

Something I was reading a couple of days ago sent me off on a strange tangent regarding the nature of "talent."

How much does writing good poetry depend on talent? Where do you rate yourself in terms of talent? Do you think talent is something visible and obvious? Can you tell the difference between a poem written by someone with talent versus someone with skill?

Essentially, I guess the question is this: Are poets born or made?

Let's do the time warp again

I requested YouTube to embed that theremin video over two days ago.

It showed up this morning.

It would have been faster to snail mail it to me.

The internets is weird.

Bizarre and ridiculously awesome

It's the theremin. I so want one. I would destroy my marriage and my neighborhood, but it would be worth it.

NaPo preliminaries

Last year, Gabriel and I wrote NaPo poems using set titles that we had agreed on beforehand. So we each had 30 poems (well, I had 31 since one title gave me a split personality) with the same titles.

He and I decided to do that again this year, and have 15 titles so far.


1. The Pickle and the Caveman
2. A Wheel of Birds
3. Unnatural Selection
4. The Radio and the Water Balloon
5. Anastomosis
6. Flounders, Teacups, and Other Tempests
7. You Are Here
8. The Existential Dilemma of Rubber Bands
9. Chemical/Electrical
10. The Peculiar Poetry of Tommy Lee Jones
11. In the Event of Locusts, Dive
12. If You Can't Be With the One You Love
13. Apocalypse Ow
14. Tesseraction Figure
15. Teething

Irving has learned a new trick

She can turn the computer on and off. Grrrrreat. She'll be getting her own kitty blog and charging kitty porn to my Discover card. Dammit, I think I need Net Nanny or something.

Bad kitty! BAAAAD KITTY!

Just another manic Monday

Actually, mania might be an improvement.

This hasn't been a good day. At all.

The icing on my Cake of Suckitude is the diagnosis of yet another of my cats with kidney disease--Halley, the fuzzball in the picture. That makes a total of four cats we've had diagnosed such.

The vet says it's just that common, but I'm having a tough time not holding myself responsible for this the same way I seem to hold myself responsible for things that are also out of my control. The economy, tsunamis, high-waisted pants. I always feel guilt when things go bad, even when it isn't my fault.

There's my happy thoughts for the day.

The dread

I'm prone to anxiety. I didn't used to be, but now I'm a veritable nervous Nellie.

I have a good job. I have a house. I have a safety net.

And I'm really afraid of what 2008 is going to do to this country and the people in it. I'm filled with dread.

I'm no economist. I don't know if the chucklehead in chief is the problem, but I do know that my little town is being ravaged by foreclosures. This was hardly a rich area to start with, but this economy is taking its toll already. How flexible can Appalachia be if hard times come?

A new record for bracket busting?

Every year at work we do NCAA tournament brackets. Every year, my bracket is ridiculous. This year, the very first game may destroy my bracket. That's a new record!

We're all in this together? Take 2

All of the discussion about the $2 Manuscript Hub fee for online submission makes me wonder about where each of us would put the financial burden for publication, generally.

Should the entire cost be shouldered by the publisher, whoever that is?

Should submitters be expected to defray some of the costs, either through things like fees or through required subscriptions?

I don't want publishers to go broke publishing poetry. None of us benefit from that.

And I know none of them are getting rich from it.

The question is simply who should pay when there are necessary costs? And which costs, in the end, are absolutely necessary?

How much more would I post if...

... I could always access this blog? I don't even know, but it's "more than now."

Blogger is getting on my last nerve. Wordpress doesn't work from my workplace. I am a blogger without a country!

The strange things on my hard drive

I'm switching computers, so I was clearing off my hard drive, wondering what to keep and what to toss. I found these three pictures, and have a vague recollection of creating them in order to have BATTLE BARDS! A poetry smackdown!

A very vague recollection.

How many shades of red can we fit in one ghastly photo?

There I was, all asnooze on the sofa with Irving, when Steve decides that we are prime photographic material.

Steve is, as you can see, completely insane.

The headband had been covering my eyes scant seconds before. The bitchface is from having a doofus point a flashy camera at me while I'm trying to snooze (and also because my right arm was completely dead at this point from Irving's weight).

It's only in photographs that I realize how pale I am. I look like a vampire.

A general statement

Those who mooch off their mothers have zero standing to write letters to editors decrying other people's lack of personal responsibility and self-reliance. GAH!

Anyone heard from...

The thing about the internet is the way people go missing all the time. Poets, especially, seem the squirrelly sort.

I was cleaning out some old emails and ran across some names I haven't seen in a while.

Maz Griffiths?

Lorinda Chard?

Carolyn Smale?

Christopher Keenan?

Morfydd Jauregui?

Duotrope, redux

I complained that I was too stupid to use Duotrope but, while I'm no smarter than I was, I found using a different browser corrected the problem.

Still, I'm left with the problem of going and looking over my submission tracker and realizing that I'm being a hell of a slacker. Maybe ignorance was bliss.

The power of politics

I had a strange thought earlier today, wondering about Eliot Spitzer's behavior, and his wife standing next to him at his speech.

I can't imagine what could bring a woman to do that, aside from politics. Aside from those brief brushes with power.

Do men know that they can't control themselves, do they know that they will lose their wives, that they will lose everything, and then they go into politics almost with the notion that she won't walk away from the marriage if there's a chance at power, even power by proxy? Is that power the rope that binds these people together?

Some women say no. Some women must be saying no, I won't go on TV, I won't stand by your side, I won't. But most do. Most stand for it. Most seem to accept it as something that comes with the territory. "If you don't stand here, June/Gloria/Yvonne, you lose everything."

Maybe freedom really is just another word for nothing to lose.

C'mon! You need the warmup!

NaPo is just around the corner. You need the practice. Poetry telephone! It's fun! Like Twister!

Poetry blog telephone (a game)

The game:

Take the given poem. Rewrite it. You can change it as much or as little as you like. Post your rewrite on your blog (drop a comment here or send me an email if you want me to link to you) and link to the poem you rewrote. Someone else rewrites yours. Ad infinitum.



The start:

Revelations

A stronger wind reveals the shape of things,
as leaves peel back from blackened twigs, or hair
displays our curving skulls. A kite's frayed strings
uncoil like asps, then snap. The lawn chair's wings
emerge when it takes flight. The skirt betrays
the thighs while mortar cracks in walls once square.
Deep-footed oaks tug at the ground and craze
the hunching concrete walk. A draft surveys
the floorboards like a tomcat. Snow falls up
and drifts the sky. Every straight thing bends
to greet the ground. Although our faces cup
the wind in hollows, skin can't comprehend
the jut of bones, the way the cyclone's maw
can find the sharp spear heart inside the straw.


Ready, set, go!

Has there ever been a stranger animal...

... than the sea dragon?

This is a picture of one. Yes, it's an animal. No, it's not a plant, though there is a plant in the picture, too.

It's just weird. Weird, man.

My new hobby

I figure peace cranes will make me at least as much money as poetry does.

Our mascot

This guy has been waiting a long time for a candidate like Obama.

He was on the table at the Obama headquarters. If I knew why, I'd tell ya.

Eek, the snow!

Forecasts calling for inches upon inches of snow.

It's not supposed to snow here, not like that.

It just supposed to snow enough to be slushy and ugly. Not inches and inches. Not *shudder* feet.

We're all in this together?

One way that a poetry blog fails is no matter how neato the poetry might be, there's no sense of a community finding a poem all at the same time, experiencing it all as a group.

There's something to be said for the sort of group experience that comes from, say, watching a favorite TV show as it airs, or reading a massive bestseller as soon as it's chosen by Oprah Winfrey. Just taking part in a site like Goodreads allows us all to see and be aware of what someone else is tackling. But the fracturing and fragmentation of poetry means that we can all very rarely have that sense. We can all very rarely know who has read what, and when.

Rob Mackenzie has challenged himself to read "Paradise Lost" during March, and despite my utter lack of desire to read that again, I felt a little tempted just because the dynamic of a group read can be so different than an individual undertaking.

Journals, of course, do put us on a bit of a schedule. There was a buzz, at least amongst many people I know, about the latest issue of Umbrella, and we could all go and read it around the same time. Still, how many of the people reading this post have read that issue of Umbrella? What have we all read? Is there any common ground?

Can we build a common ground through a common reading list? Can we Oprahfy our reading goals rather than flying around willy-nilly? Is there value in it? I must think there is or I wouldn't be talking about it. But am I the only one who finds such shared reading experiences valuable?

Would you pay to read a blog?

Discussion here of a poet-blogger who has decided to take her marketing up a notch.

I think one of the comments hit upon an important distinction between a blog and a book. Access to someone's blog posts is an ephemeral thing, like renting (as he says).

Letting go

As always, Nic of Very Like a Whale has spurred an interesting conversation, this time about how long to let a poem sit before sending it out. Also see here.

Maybe I look at it all wrong, but I tend to view earlier poems of mine as just that--earlier. They may have flaws, they are certainly not the same poems I would write now, thank god. I don't want to be stagnant and safe. So, if I let a poem sit for 10 years, the Julie who came back to edit it would barely be the Julie who wrote it. The older me would be a better me, or a cooler me, just older. My techniques change, my preferred topics and forms and linebreaks and diction change. I wouldn't write "Sparrow" again. I couldn't if I wanted to.

In a way, refusing to send work out until its been around for years is like refusing to go outside because you might be wearing shoes that will go out of fashion. Sure, there are pictures of me from the 80s where I look like the biggest doofus in history, and there are poems by me that I hardly recognize. We are each changing. At each stage, we don't need to update our poems to fit our new brains. We can start on a new poem, capture a new reality, sing a new, new song.

And having a chance to giggle at pictures like this is just icing on a fresh, delicious cake. (Sorry, Steve.)

Round on the ends and crazy in the middle

That's O-Hi-O.

I was out all yesterday working at the local campaign HQ for Obama. I did learn how to make peace cranes, but my day was otherwise fairly pointless. Bah.

Go, go, go read Lo!

Laura Heidy has an interesting post up, with the BEST analogy for comparing free verse and forms I've ever heard.

And then she says nice things about one of my poems, which means that I have to like it!

Do read Lo's contribution to Umbrella, too. It's stunning.

Submissions guidelines that make me shake my head Part II

An established mag has started taking online subs. Great!

They charge $2 for the privilege.

Um.

Huh?

Submissions guidelines that make me shake my head

From Best Poem's guidelines:

Best Poem seeks to publish, not necessarily every day, a poet’s best poem.... Poem should be fifty lines or fewer.... No simultaneous submissions, no previously published poems.

Bolding mine.

Riiiight. I'd imagine that what most people consider their "best poem" has been published. In my case, it's been published three times.

Actually, the whole paragraph struck me as snotty.