Happy Valentine’s Day and an upcoming reading with Martha Silano in Redmond
Happy Valentine’s Day out there! Today is a day for exuberance. For chocolates and flowers and celebration! I used to love getting Valentines in that little cardboard box in grade school…and later in junior high and high school, at my school you could buy pink and red carnations and have them sent to someone’s locker and someone always left me one anonymously each year, and I never found out who, but the mystery of it cheered me up! So today, give someone something unexpected. Leave a bigger tip, give them a kiss on the cheek, stay on the phone a little longer than usual. Show yourself more love too.
Glenn made me pink marshmallow hearts dipped in dark chocolate for Valentine’s Day. Gluten-free and delicious! He gets an “A.” And, after getting stuck with needles at the allergist’s all day yesterday, I think I deserve a day of fun, so we are going to see that new meaningless-yet-fun looking movie with Reese Witherspoon and spies.
To honor the day, here’s one of my favorite love poems, by Robert Graves, short but perfect:
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
And now, make sure you mark on your calendars – I’m reading with Martha Silano in two days at Soul Food Books in Redmond! 7 PM February 16th, Soul Food Books. Be there!
Radio Interviews, Covers, and other poetry news
Yesterday I got to talk with host Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and fellow female comic book superhero enthusiast Ramona Pilar Gonzalez about Wonder Woman, Joss Whedon as high priest of the religion of television, feminism and comic books, the need for goddesses in pop culture, the VIDA count, the Geek Girl Con, and a lot more. You can listen to it here.
I promised you could see the cover of my upcoming book She Returns to the Floating World soon, and here you go. It’s only the front cover so far, but the front’s the exciting part, right? Let me know what you think. The art work is Rene Lynch, a piece called “The Secret Life of the Forest (A Different Sleep)” which works really well with the themes of the book, I think, all about dream worlds and transformations.
I got to see Martha Silano read from her new book, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. The last time I saw her read at Open Books, we were reading for our books Blue Positive and Becoming the Villainess, partners in crime with Steel Toe Books. Her children were babies then – now they’re darling children, complete with giant stuffed ponies and mops of hair, nearly teenagers! Ah, nostalgia. We had a lot of fun and got to hang out with a lot of poets I love that I don’t get to see very often. (Update: for a better recap – with pictures! – check out Kelli’s blog, )Of course, we were nearly done in by a surprise blizzard that shut down the road in and out of our apartment complex, but we managed to get in and out okay (when I got home and saw the news and all the wrecks on the road near our house, I felt like a big risk taker. Then I dreamed about being Buffy and getting electrocuted. So, all in all, a normal day.) This morning the world is frosted in snow, though this being late February, it’s sort of odd for Seattle to be quite this snowy. I am very ready for spring.
Interview from the book tour, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and More News!
Check out Mary Agner’s Thursday feature with me in the Back to the Future Book Blog Tour here. I talk about my new book, there will be sample poems, Mary asks wonderful interview questions…fun, right?
Went to the Napa Valley Writers Conference for a night and attended a reading at the Mondavi winery with Major Jackson and Ron Carlson. It was wonderful to see Major read his work, which I’ve admired for a long time, and the winery setting was just perfectly beautiful for a poetry reading. Got my copy of Hoops signed (and Major’s new book is just out from Norton, though they didn’t have copies there, unfortunately.) He read from all three books of his books, and I appreciated the references to classic and pop culture hiding in his work, and his reading style was very laid back and easy to listen to. The prose reader, Ron Carlson, also read some poetry, which ended up being funny stuff. I might sneak back in to see Brenda Hillman read tonight…
Martha Silano, my Seattle-and-Steel-Toe buddy, has won the Saturnalia book prize – so her third book will be out in 2011! A good year for books, I think…
One of my poems is up – as a podcast and a “readable” poem – at qarrtsiluni today, for their “Health Issue:” “Advice From the Robot Scientist’s Daughter.”
And, it’s congrats in order for the girls today! January O’Neil, Nin Andrews, and Allison Benis White all had their books nominated for the Foreward’s Book of the Year Award in Poetry! Nice!
Are you worried that your poetry is boring? If so, read this post from Martha Silano!
