A wind storm blew out a transformer next to our house last night. I was looking out the window at around midnight, watching the wind, and all of the sudden, a bright blue light and an eerie hum for two minutes, then nothing. I thought for a second we might be abducted by aliens. However, it turned out to be the tranformer for half of our neighborhood. So far we still have power, so I’m going to take advantage of it to blog!
I had some good news this week (as well as four rejections – editors must be busy this time of year!) The first was that I have selected to read and teach at the Skagit River Poetry Festival this May, in beautiful La Conner, Washington. I’ll be reading, doing a workshop and a panel, and possibly something else – I’ll post when I have more details. But I’m very excited. I went to the last festival two years ago, and not only is the town super-charming, but the festival was well-attended by an enthusiastic audience, the poets were great (this is where I first met Dorianne Laux, resplendent in her South Park t-shirt) and the restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts fantastic. Though the town is famous for its tulips, I believe the iris fields may be in bloom.
The other was an acceptance to a Canadian journal that I sent work to strictly because of its name – Grimm Magazine. Sure enough, the poem they took was fairy-tale related. Coincidence?
Let me also announce that anyone thinking of submitting to Silk Road’s first issue should do so soon. Final decisions will be made in mid-April. Submission guidelines here – note that if you send via e-mail, which I suggest, to put your poems in the e-mail, not attachments. As a virus-stalker, I loathe attachments. Also note, don’t be limited by the whole “poem of place” thing. I intepret that phrase extremely loosely.
Also, I want to announce, for those in the Seattle area, a fund-raising event for The Seattle Review:
Sunday, February 19 at 2 p.m.
Town Hall, 8th and Seneca, Seattle
Award-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa in a benefit/celebration reading of his own work for the publication of the new anthology, Page to Page: Retrospectives of Writers from the Seattle Review, edited by Colleen J. McElroy. Tickets $20 (includes post-reading reception), available in advance at Elliott Bay starting Jan. 15, or at the door. Proceeds benefit The Seattle Review. Contact 206.624.6600.
I will not be there, since I will be in Pasco, Washington, trying my sci-fi convention/poetry hybrid experiment. But Yusef is a wonderful reader, and I used to volunteer with the Seattle Review, so get on out!
A note on my rejections: hmmm. I consider myself a sort of grrl-power feminist poet type. However, feminist journals seem not to agree. My biggest smackdowns tend to be the feminist journals. What’s up with that?

I wanted to shine a spotlight on a great new site created for “sharing and discovering opportunities for first books of poetry” called Imprimatur- a wonderful new resource for people who are in the process of having a first book of poems published or would like to. It was created by our own Ivy Alvarez – here’s the link: http://ivyai.wordpress.com/
It has everything from tips on negotiating contracts to publicity information and prizes. I know I would have loved to have had a resource like that when I first started doing book research.
Also, the lovely and talented blogger Rachel Dacus has guest-edited an issue of kaleidowhirl, which contains poems by me, fellow blogger Kelli Agodon, and fellow-Steel Toe Books author and biochemist Jennifer Gresham.

Had a lovely day across the Sound with my island-and-peninsula poetry workshop, and since I hadn’t seen my island-and-peninsula poet friends since before Christmas, it was great to catch up. I brought one of my new weird prose poems about animé (um, sort of an obsessive series of poems on Miyazaki’s work…) I’m having a lot of fun writing about this subject. Anyway, I even got to see the sun briefly (a rarity here) and got to split some appetizers with the lovely and talented Kelli afterwards. Ooh, and my friend Annette lent me some old episodes of MST3K. Gamera is really neat! He is full of turtle meat! Good times.
I haven’t been sending out much work lately. I’m kind of letting the poems roll back in slowly. I did get a nice acceptance letter from the kind editor of the beautifully-produced Evansville Review (especially nice because they are publishing my book’s title poem! Yay!) along with a couple of rejections and the myriad tax info (w2s, 1099s, etc…ah the fun of freelancing at tax time…)
And I turned in the final, final proof of the book manuscript today too – a thousand nitpicky little things, like spaces around em-dashes and missing punctuation, that kind of thing.
Now to turn to the very scary NEA application…and return to my essay for school…which is still nine pages of incoherent thought…must read more of Jung on persona and archetype, analyze Gluck’s Meadowlands, and talk about why persona poems allow women to more freely express their shadow selves. Or something like that.
(For Deb Ager: I couldn’t get my blogger comments to let me post for some reason, so let me say it here: Happy New Year to you too! And you are welcome for scones anytime!)

First of all, a shout-out to my little brother, who turns 30 today – Happy Birthday Pumpkin!

Sorry I haven’t been blogging much – all of my accumulated words are going into the first draft of the dreaded “Essay,” pretty much the only requirement of my MFA program’s third semester. It’s on “Why We Wear Masks: Contemporary Women Poets and the Persona Poem.” Right now it’s nine pages of incoherent thoughts pasted together. Yesterday I used three dictionaries, the MLA handbook, a primer on Jung, and seven web sites, all to write about a paragraph on what persona means. I’ve also been trying to write up two poetry book reviews, long overdue, finally finish commenting on a friend’s manuscript, catch up on e-mail (and Hotmail has been having some glitches, I lost some mail – so if I haven’t responded to any one of your urgent messages please re-send! This includes people who sent over the web form from this site) recover from my ten-day-absence (and the thirty-day absence of sun, blessedly broken by yesterday’s amazing, if cold, day-long sunfest.)
More on Atwood – I didn’t notice this at first, but one of the reasons I think I enjoyed her novel “Blind Assassin” so much is that the main story is a re-telling of the Procne and Philomel story, from Procne’s point of view. Agree? Disagree? Let me know!
I’ve written three poems since I’ve been back, all on the themes of Japanese fairy tales and animé. Hmph. This doesn’t belong with the other poems I’ve been writing at all. One is very formal and structured, and the other two are prose poems, which I have just barely started to write as a form. I think I was influenced by reading Sandra Alcosser and Kristy Bowen, who both have some kickass prose poems.
I’m having some poet friends over tonight so must concentrate soon on cleaning. I am generally a creature of some chaos, and straightening up is often a Herculean task. I may have convinced the husband to make his famous scones for tonight. (Using Tom Douglas’ secret cherry-almond scone recipe – the best in Seattle!)

Everywhere I go, Margaret Atwood has already been…
Here I am thinking I’m all original and what not with my villainess obsession (See here for reminder of what I’m referring to) – and I randomly picked up a book at the library to read at my residency, Atwood’s hodgepodge book of essays Writing with Intent – and what do I see but a whole chapter called “Spotty Handed Villainesses” – talking about why it’s not anti-feminist to create non-100-percent-sugar-and-spice female characters, the importance of strong female villains, etc. Hrmph. Then, yesterday, I bought her new collection The Tent – and, after spending ten years writing poems (some of which will appear in the aforementioned book, Becoming the Villainess) about the rather obscure (I thought) myth of Procne and Philomel, what should I find but an Atwood retelling of the Procne/Philomel story called “The Nightingale.”
Speaking of sci-fi mistresses of goodness, I got the pleasure of seeing Ursula LeGuin at the residency, where she proceeded to rant about the lack of teachers teaching literary fantasy and sci-fi books, which she feels have been unfairly ghettoized.
And, while I was gone, I received contributor copies of the wonderful anthology of the erotic, The Bedside Guide to the No Tell Motel, which not only looks great but is a lot of fun to read, and the new issue of American Poetry Journal, which has one of my favorite poems (don’t we all have personal favorites among our poems?) called “The Conversation” – about a female comic book superhero breaking up with her boyfriend. Anyway, run out and get both immediately.
I also noticed that sadly, none of the poet candidates for the Nat’l Book Critics Circle were women. Sigh.