Well, the weather here in Seattle has been unseasonably cold and dreary, much the same way I am feeling. I am craving warm drinks all the time now. I guess that’s why Seattle is a coffee capital.
I’ve been worrying over my manuscript lately, not wanting to send it out to any more publishers or contests before I get more feedback on it. The MS has poems written when I was 19, and some I wrote last week, so I’m wondering if its on solid ground, it’s changed a lot over the past 20 months or so, should I abandon it for the new MS I’ve been working on lately, etc. I’ve sent it out to a few friends for feedback, but if anyone else would like to volunteer, I’d be grateful for their thoughts. I’ve been feeling less like sending poems out, wanting to sit on poems longer after they’ve been written. Is this a function of being a little under the weather since the surgery in Feb, a little tired, a little depressed, or something else? I know that being in doctor’s offices just drains the energy right out of me. I’m currently scheming ways to stay out of the doctor’s offices longer, to make the weeks when I don’t have to go sit in some specialist’s offices more frequent. Vitamins, cranio-sacral therapy, more rest, yoga, supplements.
I was also thinking about blogging, the way it reminds me of how, when I was six years old, I would sneak into the basement where Dad kept a herd of TRS-80s, and I would sit and write into the computer (without a word processor, I don’t think we had them yet) and just make up stories or write how I was feeling. There is no record of all the stuff I wrote down there. By the time I was ten I was working on the family’s new little Apple computer in the upstairs spare room, writing poems before school. I can see how some people (that person in the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, for one) can think lots of negative stuff about poet bloggers, but to me, it seems like I’ve been creating solace and space for myself on computers my whole life, and blogging is just an extension of that. And now I can communicate and create with a group of like-minded people. I also thought, how very lucky my Dad always encouraged me to work on computers, how he never said that computers were only for my brothers, only for boys. I probably never would have learned programming otherwise, the fun of making your own little video games or pictures out of code. Since I quit Microsoft back in 2002 I haven’t done much in the way of coding for fun, just the spare technical article or two for $$ every so often. I think I was just totally burned out by a rapid succession of very demanding, 90-hour-a-week jobs. But I may be ready to jump back in sometime soon. You know, unless my poetry career, such as it is, suddenly takes off…

Help! I just returned from Canada and I’ve been clubbed by a baton!

Music Meme
1. The person who passed the baton to you? Jennifer Drake Thorton.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer:
Something over 800. Most by weird bands you can’t find on CD anywhere.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought:
“Martha Wainwright”, Martha Wainwright. Best song on there: Bloody Mother F**king A**hole. Seriously.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing:
“The World at Large”, Modest Mouse. Strangely soothing.

Has everyone been tapped? If you want to be batoned, speak up!

Reading Victoria Chang’s book Circle. Good stuff, some of the poems are so fierce yet understated…I want to do that! Got to go up to Whistler for the weekend, it was 97 degrees and yet I still got to have a snowball fight at the top of the mountain on the glacier. Sweeeet. Then home to four rejections. Not so sweet. But a stack of good reading material awaits…the new APR, Calyx, Another Chicago Magazine…

What kind of feminist are you?

My mom, who is studying for her Phd in Education, has been studying “feminism” in the classroom. It’s so funny, I think of myself as a feminist, because, you know, I’m for things like equal pay for equal work and radical ideas of that nature. But apparently there are specific categories. Here is the e-mail she sent me. So tell me, what kind of feminist are you?

“Kinds of feminism, according to Rosemarie Tong and Michael Crotty, are:

1) Liberal feminism – humanist (truth and vales are uniquely human, and only humans give them meaning) and politically liberal (any law or policies needs to be justified because it limits the rights of the individual to “perfect freedom”). This view strives for a society that safeguards individual rights and permits self-fulfillment, and believes the purpose of government is to protect those rights while staying out of people’s personal lives and choices as much as possible. The goal is to achieve government reforms that accord women the same political and social rights as men.

2) Marxist – revolutionary; this view believes that because the current political and social structure is based on male dominance and control, women cannot achieve equal rights through reform alone. They believe that the ends of capitalism are achieved at least partially on the oppression of women as unpaid domestic labor and low paid staff. They want the government to pay domestic workers a salary in recognition of their importance to society. They do not value the differences between men and women.

3) Radical – separatist; this view of feminism derives from the belief that oppression of women is the oldest and most grievous of all forms of deprivation of human rights. They view rape, pornography, prostitution, emotional and physical battering, sterilization, and abortion as abuse of women by men. They do not want to be like men. They believe that patriarchal societies cannot be just, and want to create matriarchal societies or entirely separate, female-only organizations to safeguard their rights.

4) Psychoanalytic – anti-Freudian, these feminists believe that the oppression of women derives from psychological notions that males are superior biologically, psychologically, sexually, and socially, and that we must discard these notions and refuse to pass them on to the next generation before females can enjoy equal rights.

5) Socialist – believe that feminists (both men and women) must unify and speak with one voice about the causes of female oppression in order to achieve freedom. They draw on all forms of feminism as variations of a single theme.

6) Existentialist – this view derives from the view that there is no orderly, stable, or sensible set of laws governing the world; therefore, everything we accept as truth is something we have construed in order to control or dominate our environment. Males oppress women by constructing myths and stories about women that ensure that “good” women will not threaten their domination. This view calls upon women to deny these images and create their own social roles that are not defined by men, but by women.

7) Postmodern – this view is that society must “deconstruct” or dismantle the elaborate social, psychological, and other structures that support the oppression of women to discover its roots, drive out its influence in science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and recognize the subtle ways in which women are prevented from empowerment. Women must stop defining themselves in terms of men altogether, and define themselves in uniquely female ways.

Mainstream thought among both sexes in the USA today is that women should have the same rights as men, that men and women should be paid the same wage for the same work, that they should be provided with the same social, political, educational, and career opportunities, and that women should be more proportionately represented in the government and other law and policy making organizations. This is not feminism, but a line of thought based on the concept of “no taxation without representation.””

I feel like I don’t fit into any of these categories exactly. My favorite “feminists” are usually writers like Margerat Atwood and A.S. Byatt who have been criticized by various “feminist” groups for their negative/”disempowering” visions of women. But we are nothing if not complicated, right? I guess maybe “existentialist feminist” might be the closest…since I love to re-work old mythologies about women…

You are William Blake! Wow. I’m impressed. Not
only are you a self-made artist and poet, but
you’ve suddenly become a very trendy guy to
like. It’s not that we doubt that you have all
your marbles, it’s just that we’re not quite
sure what you did with them to come up with
those terrifying theological visions. The
people of your time were nowhere near as
forgiving as that, and all your neighbors
thought you were a grade-A nut job. But we
love you, so rest happy.

Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmph. It’s a good thing I got Blake – he’s pretty much the only Romantic poet I can stand, except for a little Coleridge.

Have you read a book lately that was so good you just sat down and started writing about it? I had that happen recently with a book by Dana Levin, Wedding Day. Fantastic stuff, dark, twisted, funny, ultimately asking a lot of questions about American poetry, what it is, why we write it. I have to quote a little bit of it here, from a poem “Ars Poetica:” “Six monarch butterfly cocoons/ clinging to the back of your throat-/ you could feel their gold wings trembling.// You were alarmed. You felt infested./ In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,/ gagging to spit them out-/ and a voice saying Don’t, don’t –“
Anyway, wish I’d come up with that poem. Another don’t-miss poem is “Quelquechose,” which was published in the 2005 Pushcart anthology. My review of Levin’s book will be in the next issue of 88.
I turned in my final homework packet for school, so now I have officially started my six month break from homework. I hope I can keep up my writing without the extra push I’ve gotten accustomed to. I’m also hoping when I go back in January I’ll be completely well, not distracted by the constant tests and dr appts, etc.
I’ve been trying positive visualizations for my health and stuff, and I think it worked – I found out I won a small sweepsteaks for which the prize was a Stila lipgloss set. Not quite the book contest I was hoping for, but close, right? I’ve just got to aim those positive visualizations a little higher next time.

(Warning: Mini-Blog-Chapbook-Review!)
Congrats to blogger and fellow poet Steve Mueske, who recently (and happily) had his manuscript A Mnemonic For Desire, accepted for publication by Ghost Road Press! I recently received Steve Mueske’s chapbook, “Whatever the Story Requires” from Pudding House, which deals with subjects of mortality, music, Evil Kneival dolls, and the insect world, is a collection of simple grace and understated melancholy. One of my favorite poems was “After Reading of an Amazing New Device That Brings Back the Dead in Lifelike Holographic Images.” These are some excerpted lines: “…and there Aunt Mertle/ bends to the bright task of baking rhubarb pies…and soon Uncle Fred,/ dead these seventeen years, is splitting wood for the fire…Here cousin Matthew will never know/ the slice of a boat propeller, and Anne can safely ignore/ / those pricks of pain in her arm.” Good stuff. I love discovering the work of other bloggers that I might never have seen otherwise; one example is I remember being blown away by Suzanne Frischkorn’s chapbook, really lush and magical and eerie, which I can also highly recommend.
I’ve been on a reviewing roll; just finished up a review for the journal 88 and reviewed Tom C. Hunley’s The Tongue for Raven Chronicles.
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled Mother’s Day Activities. Enjoy your brunch and try to dodge those guilt trips!

So, Kate Gale at Elliot Bay Bookstore – Amazing reader, if you get a chance to see her read (she’s touring around with her new Tupelo Press book) go, go go. Esp. the poems addressed to her son and daughter, just killer. She’s one of those readers that avoids the dreaded poetry voice, doesn’t linger lovingly over her own syllables, just bangs the poems out with energy and really draws you in. A lot of very funny stuff her in her poems too. I bought her first book and am waiting til I finish it to buy her second. She also spent a lot of time answering questions about poetry community and how to built one (she’s active as a PEN president, I think, runs her own press called Red Hen, as well as the new L.A. Review, and runs a couple of reading series in LA. Wow!) I have been thinking a lot about poetry community, how I can be more involved while I am still “convalescing,” how to support local groups and magazines, etc etc. I have volunteered with several magazines over the last few years, including Seattle Review and Raven Chronicles, but have had to cut back lately, and I miss it.
At the Seattle Poetry Festival at Hugo House I got to hang out with the lovely and talented Martha Silano, who I hadn’t seen in a while, as well as man other poetry-friends and acquaintances. Went to panels on starting a literary magazine and on publishing poetry. One of the local mags I am really impressed with is Cranky, run by Amber Curtis; she talked about her print run, profit margins, the process of starting it up – to me it’s a real success story, and when she talked about it I thought Yes, that’s do-able, I could try that too. My favorite part of the festival was the fact that, along with a “grilled cheese poetry” booth, they were selling actual grilled cheese sandwiches all day, which made the whole place smell delicious.

So today I turn 32, officially entering the dreaded zone of “the mid-thirties.” On the last day of Poetry Month, which I think is very appropriate. “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs,” etc etc. I got my contributor copy of The Iowa Review yesterday (along with a record four(!!) rejections) that I saw also had poems from fellow blogger Laurel Snyder. And as an unexpected gift, the girl from the reading sent me her paper – on me! Thanks! How many times does that happen in life?
Glenn is taking me out for a nice dinner at Earth & Ocean tonight, for which I might actually get dressed up and everything.
Anyway, enjoy the last day of poetry month! Tomorrow I’ll attend the Seattle Poetry Festival, and Kate Gale’s reading at Elliot Bay, but today is an all-relaxation day.

Had to blog briefly about the poetry mail today –
New 32 Poems (has poems by me, Jeffery Bahr, and new poetry blogger Steven D. Schroeder)
New Poetry Magazine (no poems by me, sadly, but still enjoyable)
Steve Mueske’s chapbook (have to blog about that soon!)
Birthday present box from older brother consisting of: New Camille Paglia, Break Burn Blow, The DVD of Rikki Tikki Tavi (don’t ask, I just love those old animated shows), the Radio Sunnydale Buffy Soundtrack, British version, and Thisbe Neissen (who is a very cool person in real life)’s novel, Osprey Island (which I had checked out from the library but wanted to own.)
How can I complain about my little Alaska rejection (Please try again, they say!) on top of all that goodness?
Also, today wrote to my MFA program director and said I would like to take this upcoming semester off. My mentor/advisors have both been terrific, but until my health gets better, I can’t focus enough on all the school work enough to make it worthwhile. It may take a little longer to get my degree, but hey, six months off to just relax and get some health answers/treatments that work will also help ward off that poetry-burnout feeling I’ve been having. The only sad part is, this means I won’t see my friends from the program in June. Hey, I love you guys! Enjoy sunny Forest Grove without me! Hopefully I’ll see you all in January.

Another perfect warm sunny spring day in Seattle. Took a walk around a local river and saw a pair of canadian geese with goslings, a kingfisher, some goldfinches, a hummingbird, and had a close encounter with a bald eagle. Definitely a good place for birdwatching. And this is just in the suburbs, not a remote park of any sort.
I have a poetry reading tonight at the Hugo House in downtown Seattle, with another writer and an artist, under the title, “Mad, Bad, Super Women.” With a title like that I feel like I should dress up in a costume. Maybe a tiara and a sword. Too bad I don’t have any of those props lying around. I’m looking forward to doing a reading in conjunction with a visual artist – I like readings that have visual art or music aspects. I’ll update this post after the reading…
…The best parts of the reading…well, the other poet was Belle Randall, a really interesting poet who just won an NEA grant, and I just have to say, I hope I’m that good looking and funny at her age. I have one of her chapbooks now, and I’ll blog about that later. The artist, Molly Norris Curtis, was kind of a walking example of pop-culture obsession morphing into art, which was cool. The other best part was this really smart high school girl who was writing a paper for her English class and had actually looked me up on the internet pre-reading and asked intelligent questions and tape-recorded my answers. It was much more fun than if NPR had been interviewing me. I actually had to articulate something meaningful about my poetry – why am I obsessed with good girls turning evil, comic books, women action figures, etc. Hey, if you read this blog, send me your paper, and I’ll send you a free copy of my chapbook! Another good thing – afterwards, Glenn and I went out to hang at this new restaurant called Frites, where all they serve is belgian fries with a wide variety of sauces. Excellent stuff, though I still prefer thin-cut frites. Chipotle ketchup mixed with roasted red pepper mayo is my recommendation for sauces. It ain’t health food, but lately I’ve been having so much fun checking out new restaurants after readings. I don’t know about you, but I can’t really eat before a reading, so by 9 PM or so I’m just starving, and then you find the new trendy place everyone’s been talking about, order whatever (lately there was a cool barbeque joint in Columbia city, a chic bar in Kirkland, and of course Frites) and enjoy the post-reading glow.