I am working simultaneously on an article on upscale bar food in Seattle for Northwest Palate, my homework, writing a review for NewPages.com, and trying to remember what I know about the Web Services Policy specification. Sometimes it seems I live in too many worlds at once. Did I mention I’m also doing ad copy for yet another company?

I’ve been reading Marvin Bell’s (my mentor this semester at Pacific U) book of essays and interviews, called Old Snow Just Melting. I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Sometimes reading books of essays about poetry can be just as inspiring as reading poetry. He has a great bit in there about Kierkegaard, who happens to be my favorite philosopher of the moment (not in the highest of highs, like Erasmus and Pascale, but still.) Every time I think of his name, though, I always flash back to that Monty Python sketch where the German philophers play the ancient Greek philophers for the philosophy soccer tournament. One of their best, I think.

Five rejections this week (they can’t all be three-acceptance weeks, I guess 🙂 but I’m still plugging away, trying to figure out where to send next. Have I mentioned how much harder, scarier, etc., it is for me to put my poetry manuscript in the mail to publishers and contest this year than last? Last year I was clueless yet optimistic. Now, I know a lot more, and therefore know my chances to be thin. I guess I should remember the old slogan, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Have to guiltily admit to reading Foetry again, this time a thread that argues the definition of Expansive poetry, which I am still trying to get a feel for. Do I write expansive poetry, I wonder? No, probably not. But still, it’s good to know these things, in case they come up in conversation with, say, okay, it probably won’t come up in coversation.

Nintendo seems to be doing a spate of hiring again. All you gaming fanatics, why not send your resume in?

All right, off to my Daily Show fix…

Well, the poetry gods must be smiling on me lately…not only did I get a copy of the new Pontoon 7 with my poem “The Taste of Rust in August” in it, but I received not one but two acceptences within one week – one from a journal called 88 for a poem called “Breathing In the Asthma Capital” and the other from Diner for a poem with the insane title “Allerlierauh Reveals Her True Self to the Prince.” This is the kind of a week that makes all of my stress over sending stuff out and all those evelopes licked and stamps stamped seem worthwhile. Plus, I attended an excellent get-together for the fine Washington publishers Floating Bridge, where I got to chat to a million fun poet-types, and I’m going to a reading tonight for Cranky magazine featuring my friend Natasha plus big-deal Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky.

So, it’s been a poetry heavy week. It’s weird to get acceptances after what seemed like an endless series of rejections. Hopefully this trend continues. Here’s to thinking good thoughts…

Warning: There will be no technical jargon in this blog entry.

So, I have noticed a proliferation of poet blogs in the universe lately, which, generally, is a good thing. I like hearing from other poets, especially about the frustrating nature of the poetry “business,” such as it is. Here are some (non-comprehensive) links to some interesting poetry blogs: Kim Addonizio’s, Victoria Chang’s, Jeffery Bahr’s, Kelli Russell Agodon’s, and Oliver de la Paz’s.

I am reading some books for school right now, including Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language, Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, and A Donald Justice Reader. One of the chapter’s of Ostriker’s book is really interesting to me; it deals with violence and anger in women’s writing, and how she thinks women tend to write “victimization” poems where the women passively receive bad treatment from men/husbands/fathers/society etc or “revenge” poems where women are the ones doling out abuse. I have been thinking a lot about how women in my generation can transcend either of these none-too-desirable options – how to respond to violence against women, or to our own anger, without being a victim or an abuser? This is why I keep going back to comic books. For me, the best role models didn’t come from the Bible, or Greek mythology, or fairy tales, all of which pretty much had nothing but women victims and femme fatales. (There are, of course, certain exceptions: imagine my delight when I learned about the character from the Apocrypha, which I borrowed from a Catholic college roommate, of Judith. Don’t know why she didn’t make it into the regular old testaments.) My role models were the slightly alien race of women like Wonder Woman, and Batgirl (don’t ask me why, as a kid I just thought she was the coolest) and later, the female characters in X-Men and even later, characters like Sarah Pezzini from the Witchblade comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These women were feminine without being meek and overly self-sacrificing, and there was no doubt they could fight and overcome villains. The idea of being able to directly confront evil, as opposed to waiting around for someone else to do it for you, has always been very appealing to me. So I write a lot of poems about female comic book heroines, and video game heroines, etc.

I am hoping to someday do an all-comic-book-heroine chapbook, maybe even with illustrations. Wouldn’t that be cool? Yah, apparently poetry book publishers are not clamoring for this kind of subject matter, sadly. Oh well, a girl can dream.