Friend and fellow Pacific MFA alum Michelle Bitting has a poem from her new book, Good Friday Kiss, up on Verse Daily today. Go take a look!
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has an essay on scary Halloween-appropriate poems up at Poetry Foundation.com!
And I received Suzanne Frischkorn’s lovely Lit Windowpane and my publisher Tom Hunley’s Octopus in the mail this week. Octopus is full of funny and thoughtful meditations on culture, poetry and fatherhood.
Of course my favorite poem in Lit Windowpane, a group of poems about a disintegrating relationship and nature poems that echo that mood, is the first one, “The Mermaid Takes Issue with the Fable.” You can see that poem here.
Happy Earth Day! And happy backhoe accident/morning explosions!
The bad news:
The contruction workers who’ve been tearing up the lot next to our rental house back-hoed our power, phone, and cable lines at 9 AM this morning, making our morning more exciting, causing several explosions on our front porch, and also burning the metal junction box – which got so hot that it welded shut. Calls to: landlord, rental agency, power company, phone company, electrician. Maybe fixed by tomorrow? No heat, no hot water, no light, no phone, no internet. And six hundred people digging up our rental yard to re-lay power lines.
The good news: Thank goodness for the Centrum residency cabin! So Glenn was able to come over and shower, eat a hot lunch at Centrum, save all of our frozen food in the residency cabin mini-freezer. We even found the internet at the Commons (thanks Peter!) The poor kitties may be a little cold, but at least Glenn has an escape from a potentially very disturbing day. The only downside? Because they are removing some creosote material from the Fort Warden beaches, there are closed parts and helicopters removing creosote-laden beach logs.
Note to self: Residencies can be very practical, as well as creatively helpful. Just mind those helicopters!
Other note: I have been painting a watercolor a day. I am not a very good artist.