My thanks to Kelli, who answers my “good girl/bad poet” question with a quote from Margaret Atwood: “People think you can’t be a poet without being drunk. Women poets are expected to commit suicide. Someone once asked me when, not if, I would commit suicide.”
Margaret Atwood

As far as my own inspirational poetry quotes, how about this one, from a poem I have framed in my home office – Merwin’s “Berryman:”

“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”

and another from Atwood, her poem “The Words Continue Their Journey:”

“The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.”

From The Onion: Water as Metaphor?

I decided to put together my new poems to see how they were shaping up and found I had a somewhat cohesive 35-page manuscript. Weird. Does this mean I’ll have two manuscripts to send out this fall? Yikes. I’m considering re-arranging my Japanese-themed MS for the next round…

I’ve taken on a slightly reduced role at Crab Creek Review – as a consulting editor rather than a co-editor. This allows me to miss meetings as needed and spend a little more time on other projects, while still helping out the magazine. I’m really still hoping to start up a press this year. A part-time gig would be enough to cover the expenses (if it paid decently.) It’s a matter of time and energy, too. I want to focus on finding some work right now, and writing and submitting (which have both been neglected lately.)

Gearing up for my last Seattle reading for some time at Elliot Bay Book Company this Saturday…