Coming to the End of Poetry Month, and my birthday…
I’m exhausted but happy coming to the end of Poetry Month! A new class of poetry students, way too many scheduled readings to attend or even try to attend, wild, unpredictable weather, falling cherry blossoms, chocolate bunnies, my birthday – I mean, let’s face it, April can be hectic but fun. Along with celebrating turning another year older successfully, I’m about to be take the plunge into home ownership again, possibly start a new job (more on that later) and it feels like I’m entering a new chapter of my life. A good chapter. I hope! Less “post-apocalyptic survivalist reality show” and more “Girl Finds Love and Success in the Big City!”
It has also started to occur to me, at this birthday go-around, that if we want good things to happen in our community, if we want people around us to get to know and love poetry, that we need to take an active hand to make that happen. To paraphrase a popular saying, we have to become the arts advocates we are looking for.
I had a wonderful time working with local musician Joy Mills at the Bushwick Book Club event at Hugo House. Hearing the song she wrote based on “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle” was just fantastic, and she is pretty great live, too. I’m glad they didn’t ask me to sing! I just had to read the poem, thank goodness. Had fun meeting other local poets, too. Always a pleasure being at Hugo House.
And now, onto the birthday-end-of-month-scurry-to-get-packed-and-ready-to-move-and-some-other-things-I’ll-reveal-later!
Mini-review of two new books, superstress week, poetry month
Wednesday is the big presentation day that determines whether or not I’ll get the job I’ve been stressing out over for a month or two now. Wish me luck! Contractor meeting this afternoon. And grading. Also, Wednesday night, I’ll be teaching a class with RASP with teens on anime, haiku and haibun. Then, the next day, off to Hugo House for an amazing musician/poet collaborative presentation. Then, I’ll turn 39, then celebrate a few days by signing a lot of papers that will plant us some roots – finally in the Northwest. But whew! This month is killing me! And May is going to be just as busy!
Still trying to keep up with my mini-reviews of my poetry-book-reading-a-day April project, but falling a bit behind. To remedy some of that, here are a couple of reviews of two local writers’ recent books:
Molly Tenenbaum’s The Cupboard Artist, recently out from Floating Bridge Press, presents the every day world: food, music, household objects like ugly paint colors and swing sets – in a way that reflects on human relationships, science, and the universe. Her whimsical sense of humor and music shine through in poems like “Birthday Cake:” “She’s a cartoon, she’s splashing the spoon,/ she’s a mud-flapping lab coat/ dark stream swirling marbling smoothing/ /he doesn’t like chocolate, he doesn’t -” Floating Bridge always does a loving, lovely job with their production, so the book is a really beautiful artifact as well.
Carol Levin’s Stunned by the Velocity from Pecan Grove Press is a recounting of a year, 1968, and one couple’s adventures and travels, including women kidnapped into a Greek convent, a couple’s sometimes humorous conflicts with hostesses who throw lamps and attempts to procure transportation along the way. Carol works with me at Crab Creek Review and her attention to detail, to the ironies of the troublesome realities of travel, and her unique perspectives on time and place here are sure to delight.
Of Lamb mini-review and exciting news at Hugo House!
Lately I’ve been fascinated by collaborations between poets and artists, and none that I’ve seen is as successful as Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter’s Of Lamb. It started as a poetic erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb by Lord David Cecil and became a weird and wonderful midrash of the story of Mary and her little Lamb. Lamb and Mary go on adventures, fall in and out of love and asylums; the pictures bloom out of the few lines of poetry/story on every page. A sample scene to your left.
Amy Jean Porter’s colorful gouache and ink paper paintings have a bit of children’s book aesthetic mixed with a touch of Japanese “Superflat” cuteness and surreality. The tone of Matthea’s work goes perfectly with the paintings, and the paintings and text work together; each lends the other depth and nuance. The writing is surprisingly moving as well as playful; the true story of Charles Lamb’s troubled relationship with his beloved older sister, Mary, lies right beneath the Mary-Little-Lamb trope. I highly recommend this book! It definitely expands the idea of what a poetry book can do and can be.
Exciting news at Richard Hugo House here in Seattle! Tree Swenson is leaving her post as executive director of the Academy of American Poets to become the new director of our own Hugo House! I’m very happy to hear this, and look forward to seeing in what direction Tree will encourage the Hugo House in the future. Congrats to Hugo House and I know Seattle will be happy to have Tree Swenson in town!
Fiction by Poets, Best of the Net, and more Readings!
The news doesn’t stop! Just like me – go go go!
I’ll be reading this Thursday night at Hugo House in Seattle as part of the “Cheap Wine and Poetry” series, a Ladies Night with some great local writers (including another Steel Toe author…) 7 PM. Be there, baby!
Thanks to Redheaded Stepchild for nominating my poem, “A True Princess Bruises,” for Best of the Net! Awesome! It’s kind of a little spin on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale…and belongs in the fairy-tale-body-image manuscript I’ve been working on, along with my robot scientist’s daughter manuscript…that’s right – two more manuscripts! I keep myself busy, right?
And, my very first piece of fiction, “How Not To Be A Robot Scientist’s Daughter,” is up at Fiction Southeast, along with champions of fiction like Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender and Robert Olen Butler and fellow poet-fictionist Oliver de la Paz!
