It’s one of those poetry days…
I woke up from a series of disturbing dreams about hundreds of dead swans floating under water with a poem line in my head that I immediately wrote down:
“I could give my cocoon up to the grass”
which is one of those things that seem like genius when you first wake up and then, later, you’re left scratching your head.
I found out from my publisher that my book, Becoming the Villainess, has been adopted for an Intro to Creative Writing class at a University in Florida. I’m so excited! Although, sorry to those of you who will be forced to read my book for homework 😉 Still, it’s more exciting than reading Leaves of Grass for the twentieth time.
And I heard that the reading Martha Silano and I are doing at Open Books this upcoming Tuesday the 16th will be recorded for possible future radio airing on the local NPR station KUOW’s The Beat…exciting!
My little brother sent me an article from Wired talking about the reason young men are captivated by sexy powerful female role models in video games: How Lara Croft Steals Hearts. This article discusses the “Final Girl” theory that Jordan talked about a few days ago. None of this is a surprise – it’s been going on since Wonder Woman was created by a Jungian-obsessed Harvard professor who wanted a positive “anima” role model for boys and also, um, a lot of hot bondage action. Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion of Wonder Woman’s origins, although they leave out any Jungian references.
Yesterday I wrote a poem that does not belong with any other new poems – instead, it’s a throwback to my old Grimms obsessions. I’m trying purposefully not to keep writing about the same things – hence my new penchant for writing about Japanese fairy tales and animé and trying to teach myself Kanji etc. Hmph. But I guess you should write the poems that want to be written and worry about sorting them later.

Report from a Billionaire’s living room exposed:
The art show that I went to last weekend, DoubleTake: From Monet to Lichtenstein, at the Experience Music Project in Seattle (the Gehry building beneath the Space Needle, which houses all of Paul Allen’s projects, including the Science Fiction museum and the EMP music museum – and now part of his personal art collection) was a little unsettling for me. First, they take you into a small, roped-off room, and make you watch a film defining things like “composition” and “color” narrated by David Hyde Pierce. After two minutes I ducked under the rope, frantic to escape, trying to find my way to the actual art. I hate anything that feels like a lecture about art – I went to my year of Art History, dammit! – I want to experience the art myself. Then you are given a talking handpiece which explains in “hip” language exactly what you are supposed to notice about the juxtaposed works. We, appropriately armed, are led into a single room, divided into three sections, which houses sometimes clever juxtapositions of one piece of art next to another, to highlight their differences and similarities, I assume. Sometimes this felt brilliant, other times condescending. On one wall where the juxtapositions worked, there were several paintings of the canals of Venice, one by Monet, one by Manet, one by Turner, and one by Caneletto. The Manet and Turner were both stunningly beautiful, and I’m not always a big Manet fan, but something about those intense blues, especially next to Turner’s gold light…of course what they wanted you to notice was that the images grew less defined as your eye went from painting to painting. The first wall you encounter was the huge promised Lichtenstein (of course, just having been to the incredible Lichtenstein exhibit at the Henry a month or so, I was less excited than I might have been) of “The Kiss,” a woman embracing a pilot with an airplane outline in the background – this was set next to Renoir’s “The Reader,” inviting comments about the positioning of the woman’s head, the background, etc. A wonderful Jasper Johns called “Numbers” – which was a brushed, beaten metal piece embedded with, you guessed it, random numbers, looked strangely appropriate next to a Monet of the Rouen cathedral. And one of the most amazing pieces of the collection was Jan Brueghel the Younger’s painting, “The Five Senses: Sight,” self-referential and delightfully detailed, a work I could have looked at for hours, next to Seurat’s “The Models” which has three women in varying states of undress seemingly in front of his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, visible as a background corner – again, winkingly self-referential, and amazing work. A Max Ernst painting of an alien landscape was set next to Van Gogh’s “Orchard with Flowering Peach Trees.”
The framing of all the works was odd to say the least (trying not to give the masterworks’ pieces more importance than modern pieces, some frames looked like ten dollar throwaways, others fancifully elaborate) and the lighting was downright bad, and the juxtapositions of contemporaty versus modernist versus classical work didn’t always serve their purposes. However, since the Seattle Art Museum is closed down right now for renovation and Seattleites don’t have chances to see this many Impressionists together anywhere else, even when the SAM is open, I’d say it’s worth the $8 visit.
On to more poetry-oriented news –
I was delighted to receive a contributor’s copy of Grimm Magazine, my very first appearance in a Canadian journal. This perfect-bound journal has an offbeat, artsy feel, and is named after editor Ed Grimm, in case you were wondering. Check out www.grimmagazine.com.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I haven’t been sending out much because I’ve got so much work that still hasn’t come back from last year. No rejections, no acceptances, no news whatsoever! What’s up with that?
I’m nervous about my May 16th reading at Open Books, my first ever official “Becoming the Villainess” reading in Seattle. Nervous nervous nervous!

I tell you, it’s not safe to shut off the e-mail for a second! Just cracked open the laptop for the first time all weekend to get this welcome birthday news from my kind publisher Tom Hunley at Steel Toe Books – that my poem “When Red Becomes the Wolf” is up at Verse Daily! Coincidentally, the other new Steel Toe Books author, Martha Silano, has a poem up today at Poetry Daily. Thanks to Tom for letting me know. Seriously, I’m going to have to send those Verse Daily people candy or something.
Thanks for all your birthday well-wishes, by the way – it was a splendidly lazy weekend, with art and duck and many other good things, playing tourist in downtown Seattle. It was super rainy yesterday but beautiful today, which just matches my much uplifed spirits. Nothing like a rest to make you want to write again!
PS If you can find the transcript of Stephen Colbert’s White House Correspondant’s Dinner for a laugh, read it.

Thereare all kinds of poetry events going on this weekend that I should be going to (Burning Word, Rebecca Loudon’s concert, three friends’ poetry readings…) but the husband is whisking me away for a birthday weekend of romantic entanglement (turning 33 on Sunday) so I’m going to shut off my brain and just try to relax and have some fun. But I will be thinking of you and your poetry activities and Rebecca’s beautiful concert.
Thanks to Jordan for the interesting take on Becoming the Villainess – he also discusses Gina Franco’s The Keepsake Storm (cool title!) His post made me go out and investigate Alice Fulton, who I’d heard of but never really read.

Wordstock and More…(Picture of Dr. Peter Pereira at Wordstock. None of me because I am moving around so much during the readings that they are all blurry.)
Finally got some sleep last night (after a week of insomnia) after getting back late late late from the very fun Portland, Oregon Wordstock festival. Got there on Friday to have dinner with friends before the festival, and then stayed through the end of the day Sunday (exhausting but worth it!) A mountain of good readings, book booths…got to chat with one of the editors of Burnside Review, where I got a copy of Laurel Snyder’s chapbook, Daphne and Jim (yay! Looking forward to reading it!) a copy of Scott Hightower’s second book, Martha Silano’s Blue Positive and a copy of Barrow Street Review to read, even though my review stack is so high I can no longer see the top of it. I saw my wonderful mentors Dorianne Laux and Debra Magpie Earling do a spectacular reading, Seattle friends Martha Silano and Kevin Craft (who I got to introduce), Yusef Komunyakaa (who I see at every opportunity b/c he is such a fantastic reader,) and I got to introduce my friends Joseph Millar and Lisa Galloway at the very last reading on Sunday. I got to sit in the VIP room (!!) with a lot of famous folks I was too shy to interact with (Joyce Carol Oates, Edward Hirsh, Gore Vidal..) and hobnob with some very charming Copper Canyon authors at the reception on Saturday – including the aforementioned Scott Hightower and Amy Uyematsu, both of whom were wonderful. I saw so many faculty members and students (and Rusty!) from my MFA program it was like a little reunion! I heard that Thisbe Neissen (who I really admire) was reading, but I never saw her, so it could have been a myth. Dave Eggers read but that reading was so packed you couldn’t get near enough to hear.
Our reading, on Saturday, which was me and Peter Pereira, was opposite Joyce Carol Oates, so I thought we wouldn’t have much of a crowd, but I was overwhelmed by the number of encouraging faces in the audience, including old friends from Pacific U and just a good mix overall. Peter is not just a great poet but he radiates goodness like a little halo – of course his reading was fabulous, and he read first, from his book Saying the World and his new to-be-published-by-Copper-Canyon manuscript, which made the audience so happy the tolerated me quite cheerfully 😉 I did think I might even have heard a little woo-hooing from a girl in the back when I read my Buffy poem, but that could have been my imagination. We had a minor worry until my husband Glenn with help from Copper Canyon’s Joseph Bednarik graciously help us set up our books to sell after the reading (they were supposed to be on a table, but of course no books were there, etc…) so even the mini book signing went off without much of a hitch. My first ever book signing for Becoming the Villainess! It’s official now that this book actually exists. People have seen it. Happy happy!
In other news…when worlds collide – I was checking in on my site for animé news, http://www.aintitcool.com/, where they reviewed the show Can’t Get a Date – and they loved Jim Behrle! It does seem, then, that geeks love poets…
Must unpack and catch up on errands…more later…