Second of all, a pleasant reading surprise – I picked up a copy of Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the practice and the art (a bunch of essays by people who’ve taught at the Warren Wilson program) and just loved Elinor Wilner’s piece called “The Closeness of Distance, or Narcissus as Seen by the Lake.” It’s practically a love song to persona poetry, or, as she describes it, “aesthetic distance” – poems in which the speaker cannot be assumed to be the poet, and poems in which the writer is explicitly not “writing what she knows.” She uses Daisy Fried as one example. She champions – what a novel idea – imagination as a real asset to poets.
There’s also a very decent essay by Larry Levis on elegies, and that Tony Hoagland piece about non-narrative/experimental poetry that appeared in – what? APR or Writer’s Chronicle a little while back? So, to those of you who like to read essays about poetry, it’s a good buy.

I leave the blog on Sunday to teach two weeks of a junior high creative arts camp – sponsored by Centrum – and boy, is it ever intensive: starting at 8:30 AM every day and ending at 9 PM at night. I usually don’t even wake up before 9:30! I will be teaching the kids about the connections between comic books, mythology, and poetry; I will bring in illustrated guides to mythology, and comic books, and hopefully inspire them to write in a new way. If I get ambitious, I may even talk about Carl Jung. I mean, junior high kids can grok archetypes, right? But I may not have much time or energy to blog during that time. So, I’ll miss you, and think good thoughts for me staying phsyically healthy and mentally un-crazy during those two weeks.

Thanks to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry for nominating my poem “Chaos Theory” for a Rhysling Award. It’s a poem about my Dad’s work investigating how to cleanup the Fernald Superfund site – wow, doesn’t that sound riveting The Magazine of Speculative Poetry is a really fun read, by the way, for those of you who didn’t know there was such a thing as “speculative poetry.”

One note: you may want to check out the Poetry Foundation’s features section in the next few days. In case, you know, a certain poetry supervillainess gets to interview a certain poetry superheroine therein. About comic books and anime and robots and other cool subject matter. I’m just saying.