Hello all! Hope you have all had a good 2009, so far. Seattle, I understand, is still battling snow. Here in SoCal it’s been a tad colder than usual, but nothing to complain about.

I had a little bit of news that I wanted to share. A few years ago I started studying Japanese and Japanese culture, and this led me to reading quite a bit of Japanese poetry. I started experimenting with haiku and haibun. I sent in a haiku to the Mainichi Haiku Contest last year, and just found out I was an “Honorable Mention.”
Here’s a link to the pdf of the winners:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/features/haiku/etc/pdf/MainichiHaikuContest2008.pdf
It’s worth reading all of it, especially the translations into French and Japanese (but if you’re looking for me, I’m on page 13.)
For some reason this made me quite happy. (And thanks to Michael Dylan Welch who told me about the news!)

I was talking yesterday about impatience. Impatience is not a great character trait for a poet – all that waiting, and waiting, and waiting…but alas, I’ve always been a kind of jumpy, impatient, nervous type. I was thinking about how I don’t want to send out any poems in the new year until I start hearing back from magazines. How I worry and fret when a magazine takes longer than six months to get back to me (which is often.) How every time I send a manuscript out, I’m counting the hours til I hear the result.
I think about poor Sylvia Plath – if she’d just been a little more patient, she might not have been overwhelmed by all the other circumstances in her life, the snow and the health problems and the Ted stuff, might have seen that her poetry career was just about to take off, that she was writing the best poetry she’d ever written. She really wanted that Yale Younger Poets Prize before she was thirty. If she’d only known losing that prize wouldn’t be important long term. If only she’d known how the feminist movement was about to explode, and her poetry would be adored by all nineteen-year-old college girls for decades to come, and if only she’d known, if only she had waited a little longer…and I think about Emily D, sending out poems only to have them rejected or gently made fun of by older editors who just didn’t understand the revolution in poetry Emily was undertaking. If only she’d known while she was still alive how important her writing was, how treasured it would be down the road.
And I was thinking, the lesson here is that the real work is the writing, keep writing, keep sending out, but don’t be so nervous about the outcomes.