“And Henry says,
You’re lucky to even know me,
you’re lucky to be alive.
You’re lucky to be drinking here for free
cause I’m a sucker for your lucky pretty eyes…”

Today I am grateful. I am busy, stressed, shipping out Christmas packages, unpacking and repacking for another trip, this time home to Cincinnati, trying to get everything done before I leave. Trying to keep in touch with many friends, and I am lucky to have so many friends. Trying to keep my writing stuff organized, trying to meet school paperwork deadlines, trying to keep up with which poems are where and why and how. Trying to get ready for my reading Thursday night. I am excited about my first book, feeling hopeful about the awkward second manuscript I’ve been working on, feeling grateful that someone is taking a chance on me and Becoming the Villainess. Grateful for a recent acceptance from a journal I really like, Wicked Alice. Grateful I can still love being with my husband of 11+ years after six hours in the car together; grateful that when we went dancing we still remembered how to move our feet, how to head-bang, how to slow-dance. I’m grateful for the fat, black-capped Anna’s Hummingbird still guarding my feeder throw snow and cold rain.

“And he keeps telling me
you, you have time
(but I don’t believe him)”

The indomitable Ivy Alvarez has an interview of me and poet Jill Chan up at http://ahappening.typepad.com/qarrtsiluni/
Thanks Ivy 🙂
Now, I’m off to Whistler, BC to battle the great white north til Monday. Have a great weekend!

Seattle Art Scene News…

Now, as we know, the public (ie, regular people’s) access to great art is usually dependent on some eccentric kajillionaire – his decision to donate say, 15 mil worth of Van Gogh and Monet to a Boston museum, or leaving his or her priceless collection of heirlooms to the Smithsonian. Well, here in Seattle, where the Seattle Art Museum (sadly, describing their art collection as “lame” would be too nice, and only every third year do they even get a special exhibit worth visiting) has long disappointed my art-seeking mania, our own eccentric kajillionaire, Paul Allen, has decided to (probably for a hefty fee) display his tremendous collection of art in the Experience Music Project building – for the story see here http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002652590_allenart29.html
Lichtenstein, De Kooning, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh…if you’ve heard of them, he probably has a piece by them. I’m especially excited about the Lichtenstein, I’m a huge fan of his work, which must be seen in person to appreciate. Now, the down side is this very rich guy who charges an arm and a leg to visit EMP, the also-housed-in-the-same-building Science Fiction Museum (yes, a seperate fee for each) will probably also charge an outrageous amount to see his art exhibit. But it’s still cheaper than a visit to San Fran, Boston, or NYC.
The Bellevue Art Museum is also trying to get back on it’s feet. The lofty, centrally-located building has sat empty for many moons now, and back when it did house art (art exhibits included colorful underwear strung across the ceiling, an entire room carpeted on all sides in astroturf, and an exhibit where you laid yourself down on a cube, put on earphones, and watched a video on the ceiling display endless loops of video game heroine Lara Croft being killed) it didn’t exactly bring in the crowds – though I enjoyed it 🙂 I’m hoping they build up a clientele so they can stay in business. The Tacoma Museum of Glass is another fun place to visit, although a bit of a drive from Seattle – their outdoor exhibits (which you can see for free) including a glass-ceilinged bridge containing hundreds of pieces of glass art by Chihuly, and one time, a fountain in which hundreds of red blown glass apples bobbed) often beat the indoors exhibits, except for the working glass shop studio, which is worth your time.
Anyway, visual art is very appealing to me – something I can’t do or make, but that I crave. So, this new infusion is welcome news…just think, with enough $$ you will be able to see Darth Vader’s helmet, Jimi Hendrix’s embroidered suits (he was tiny!) and Gauguin’s painting all in the same visit.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
And Rebecca Loudon has once again said it better than I can…
http://radishking.blogspot.com/2005/11/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving.html

Its perfect reading weather this time of year, dreary, cold, with short days, and I find myself more and more huddled in my cat-abused chair by the fireplace. I just finished the riveting Here, Bullet, by Brian Turner, which is so accomplished, so clean, and yet moving – I dreamed about being in Iraq after I read it. It just impressed itself into my mind like a brand. And, the wonderful new journal The Fairy Tale Review (www.fairytalereview.com) – I keep reading and re-reading and always find something new. It’s not an academic journal, it’s full of fanciful prose and poetry by the likes of Kim Addonizio, Aimee Bender, Francine Prose…there’s hardly a bad piece in the whole thing, and the journal looks like one of Andrew Lang’s Blue (Red, Crimson, etc) Fairy Books. It’s like I wished something like this to exist and bang, it came into being. Anyway, buy it – $10 is steep for most lit mags, but this one is worth it.

A little slug of good news in the transom today…I know this is old hat for a lot of you, but I just got my first-ever Pushcart nomination, from American Poetry Journal for “Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon.” Yippee!

I’ve been lucky – in the latest slug of November-y, drizzling cold rainy days, which can suck the life out of you and make you wonder why you moved the Northwest, I got to see a friend (Kelli Russell Agodon) give one of her best readings ever at the cozy Ravenna Third Place Books venue, and then yesterday got to have a lovely lunch of crepes (mine: toffee-caramel-apple) and coffee with another friend and very talented poet, Annette. I mean, if you have to fight off the gloom of winter, that’s the way to do it.
Now I’ve started reading, appropriately enough for a time of year when it’s dark at 4 PM (if you’re lucky enough to have some sun to start with) Lucille Clifton’s Book of Light. I’ve read through Clifton’s collected/selected books before, but this book really showcases the strength of Clifton’s compact, simple but powerful and direct vocabulary and phrasing. I’m loving the poems about Leda, Cain, and Superman.
Two rejections today with long nice notes, but still – feeling a bit bruised. Been writing some new poems – maybe for the second book – in a new vein, something a little different. Even a prose poem, what’s that line from “Why I am not a Painter” “It is even in prose, now I am a real poet!”

I have an embarrassment of riches of blogger poet chapbooks – Ivy Alvarez’s charming ten-poem collection What’s Wrong, kind of a suite of broken love poems, and Alison Pelegrin’s gritty, bittersweet, street-wise Squeezers. I highly recommend both – I can honestly say I got more out of these collections than the last ten literary magazines I have read. This on top of Miss Frischkorn’s chapbook of last week, which I would read again and again just for the mermaid poems (which I understand are also in the new issue of Margie?)
I’ve been missing my little brother lately. He lives 3000 miles away and hates talking on the phone, so. He was always a weird kid, in his teenage years he would listen to a mix tape of Toole and Beethoven, neither of which I would have chosen to listen to (sorry Rebecca!) but I gained an appreciation and affection for both because of him. For his vast collection of old X-Men comics, his superior knowledge of the coolest video games, his uncanny knack for remembering details about the old obscure early eighties cartoons and shows we used to watch together (Fraggle Rock? Danger Mouse? Warriors of the Wind?) For Christmas a couple of years ago I received a toy from him that was my favorite toy when I was about eight and he was five. Someone stole this little object from me (called a Nyamy kitten, produced for about nine months in 1980) when I was on a girl scout camping trip, and I cried and cried for literally weeks about losing this toy, the only thing I had asked for at Christmastime that year – of course by the time it was stolen the toy was no longer on shelves, something to do with the flammable metal filings the toy was stuffed with. Well, now my Nyamy kitten is back, flammable innards and all, thanks to my little brother. What kind of person remembers a thing like that twenty years later?
Now that I’m healthier I’m getting a chance to socialize more – I’m going to like thirty poetry-related things in the next three days, it seems like. It’s nice to get to interact with poet-people again, makes me feel like less of an alien. I’ve sent off a bunch of queries to different magazines since I have the energy to write again, about travel and food and technology, respectively. It’s amazing how much more productive I am! Hrmph – I think I had forgotten “normal, un-sick me” has a rabid do-something energy. I actually dusted my house. E-mailed old friends to see what’s up. Rearranged photos, cleaned up paperwork, paid bills. Now if I could only channel that into writing some poems…

Oh, and I now have a cool new form so you can sign up for news about my book (and, maybe later, readings associated with said book…) – check it out if you’re interested – https://webbish6.com/poetry/contactform.htm

The discussion here at K. Silem Mohammad’s blog, http://limetree.ksilem.com/ (Dead Kitten Poetics) reminds me of a quote from an old beloved show of mine that used to be on MTV, Daria, from the episode “Quinn the Brain:”
“Her writing is BAD. Don’t people know the difference between GOOD and BAD?”

Did you ever feel you knew in your gut a piece of writing was good or bad, but couldn’t explain why? Is this due to a shortcoming in our poetics, the individual’s taste, or socialized constructs of taste? Something beyond definable style or subject matter, some ineffable “it.” Like when you find someone irresistably attractive, but you can’t say why, or why you love asparagus.

(For a fascinating discussion of the false dichotomies of avant-garde versus school o’ quietude, see here, http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/field-charts-venn-diagrams-and-dead.html.)
So many interesting blog posts, so little time. Did I mention I spent today getting three fillings, so these interesting posts are distracting me from the fact that I look like one of those old-fashioned cartoon people with puffy jaws and ice bags tied to their faces.

(Under the heading of, Poets Who Actually Deserve Big Prizes or, do I know how to pick ’em or what?)
Big congrats to two winners of the $40,000 Whiting Award, Ilya Kaminsky and Dana Levin. Sometime in the last year I loved each of their books to death (Ilya’s Dancing in Odessa and Dana Levin’s Wedding Day) and wrote glowing reviews of them – my review of Ilya’s book review is in The Pedestal and my review of Dana’s book is in the new issue of 88.) Sometimes it is work to try to find something positive to say about books of poetry, but both these reviews were based on real, punch-in-the-gut admiration.
Seriously, if I was going to pick two upcoming poets who deserved a prize like this, based on two books released in the last twelve months or so, it would be these two poets. So hooray.
I am finishing Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (a fabo sendup of politics in academia, race, and American culture – and a real pleasure to read, funny and acid sharp – very anti-poetry, I think, and among the main characters is a thinly veiled parody composite Jorie Graham/Louise Gluck character) and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle. Sometimes I need a little fiction to help me write better poems. I loved the fierce feminism in the fragmented poems of Kristy Bowen’s chapbook Errata, which you can still get for free until Nov 1 – see her blog, here.
In the last two months, sales of Female Comic Book Superheroes have raised a little over $40 for Katrina flood victim relief. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy! I’m sending the funds on Halloween.

And, in case you were wondering, here is a link to the final version of my book cover – many thanks to everyone who responded about the previous draft – now I just have to wait to see it on real live paper!