I have a photo (of seahorses) in Scientific American!
This is some of what’s been keeping me busy:
Lake Erie from our cottage.
Alan and I at Cedar Point.
In writing news, I sold a poem to The Furnace Review! Yay! I love them. Also, I have two poems in the recently released issue of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, including my sci-fi adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
Read “Praying Drunk” by Andrew Hudgins.
Last Sunday I went to see Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal Martínez read at Vanderbilt. I don’t speak Spanish, so I had to rely on the translations, which is always a bit dodgy with poetry. If you watch the video linked above, you’ll see he read a number of poems including “Gazing at the Stars with Martie” (not sure I have the name of his friend right), “White Holes,” “On the Banks of the Ohio in Kentucky,” “The Cell Phone” and “The Origin of the Species,” after which his latest book is named. The video is worth listening to – don’t know if it’s worth watching, so you could probably just minimize it and multitask. Best line (from memory): “The canonization of John Paul II goes against Darwin’s theory. It is not an evolution but a retrogression.”
In other news, this week was administrative professional’s day, which is what they’re calling secretary’s day now that we’ve collectively decided that “secretary” is demeaning (news in 2020: “administrative professional” now considered demeaning). In honour of my extreme awesomeness, my boss-doctors at the hospital got me a gift card to an online bookstore which shall remain nameless in a pointless attempt not to increase their market share. I got almost everything on my wishlist, and the bulk of it arrived today, including After the Ark by Luke Johnson, who is one of my P&W Speakeasy peeps as well as being a tremendous poet. Plus I got Turko’s Book of Forms, which I’ve been coveting for awhile, and a bunch of Robin McKinley (fantasy) and Jennifer Crusie (romance) books, and Joey Comeau’s One Bloody Thing After Another, which I finished yesterday and which is really fantastic and disturbing, as you might guess from the lesbian young adult romance vs chained-up monster mother plot synopsis.
Stirring just reprinted my poem “The Butterfly Factory.”
New poem “Bluebeard” just posted at Chizine!
Read “My Parents Have Come Home Laughing” by Mark Jarman, then write about a moment in your childhood.
Read “Mostly Mick Jagger” by Catie Rosemurgy, then write a poem about a musician or celebrity.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Think of an acronym you use all the time—a government agency, technical term or product. Now make a list of all the things you can think of that the acronym could stand for. Be as silly or whimsical as you like. Then write a poem using one or more of the phrases you’ve created. (Idea from here.) For some inspiration, though this poem as far as I know has nothing to do with this prompt, process-wise, read “Humanimal [Feral children are fatty]” by Bhanu Kapil.
