où sont mes fruits

After a few last minute mishaps, we’re off to Paris tomorrow. My daughter will turn 13 there on Sunday. I told her any visitor who turns 13 in Paris, who enters their teens, will have a good love life when they’re older. She bought this, and I was glad she accepted it as a superstition possibly in currency beyond her own mother’s mind. I think of how my father and step-mother told me they’d had an astrologist do everyone in the family’s charts –I was about 13 at the time– and they sat me down one day and said oh how we hate to say this but your chart shows that you’re going to have a life of suffering - a sad suggestion I often refer back to.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Paris, also to suffering there. I’ve never been much of a francophile, but I do love the country’s red wines, the perfumes of Guerlain and Chanel, the word fromage, which is so droll, and especially Eric Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose “Montparnasse” is one of the few poems I know by heart. I learned it in French by singing it to the music composed for the poem by Poulenc.

acknowledgements

I am eternally grateful to cabbage.
There is an orange farmer in Spain whom I can’t thank enough.

To John, from the bottom of my heart! From the bottom of the bottomless blue blue blue pool.

Thanks to my mom with a capital O.
Pastilles have earned my abiding affection.

My deepest gratitude belongs to skank of all sorts.
I’ll never forget Molly. Molly, you old dog.

Somewhere there’s a small grouping of ants I owe a number of revelatory moments to.

I’m forever indebted to Bank of America.
I couldn’t let this opportunity go by without mentioning Ms. Schmeling, former nun and niece of Max.

Particular thanks to every Wednesday.
To my colleagues at the university. I tender you my grateful acknowledgement.
Have I overlooked someone?

For all his time, emotional support, suggestions, insight, the car, the fur coat, the pillow plumping?

I gratefully wish to acknowledge.
I wish to gratefully acknowledge.
I acknowlege the grateful wish.
Gratefully I acknowledge to wish.

With grateful appreciation?

I owe many evenings of vacant pleasure to candle wax dripping down bulging chianti bottles swaddled in straw. Thank you, thank you.

I am grateful to those journals that rejected me shortly before going under.

It’s been my privilege to continue sleeping on a 14-year old futon the dealer said should last five years.

To all the natives who invited me into their homes.
To Miranda W. for her generous guidance without which I would hardly be able to brush my teeth!

I hover many hours raptured with generosity.
To Dr. Beykirch, neurologist and human being.

Is he strong? Listen bud,

Yesterday I read 150+ pages of The Crimson Petal: 361 pages to go.

Yesterday I home-made tomato sauce; today it’s hamburgers.

Yesterday I was killing myself in increments; today “go forth and prosper.”

It should be warm and puny today but now it’s damp and mismanaged; Yesterday it was cramped and overcast. I took a shower. This is an advertisement for rain.

I’m not eating my Wheaties, loving my neighbor, taking out disability insurance; time is money.

I got up around 7 am yesterday; today it was 5.30. Yesterday was a holiday.

I politely asked Carlo to roll onto his side last night when he was snoring and my effort was a great success; today who knows.

I hate tv; tv hates me.

Carlo is taking Luisa to an opera tonight; Miles and I are watching Spiderman. He’s got radioactive blood.

The insects will outlive everyone.

didactic cognac

I had a poem accepted at The Dirty Napkin this morning - "Emergency Substitutions." It's a somewhat older poem and I'm glad it found a home. Two other poems were turned down, so of course after my blip of happiness for "Emergency Substitutions," I began lamenting for the other two poems. Maybe they're really bad, or stupid, or maybe my older poems are better than my new poems, or boring, or spastic, or mabe I'm spastic, or old, or maybe I should just accept the blip of happiness and then shut up. Anyway, "Emergency Substitutions" includes cognac, heat deaths, tv news, cooking, eggs, medical research and all kinds of stuff and I hope you will read it when it comes out.

It's a holiday here and Luisa and I have ruined two cakes! The first one simply failed and the second crumbled. Ach, who cares. We're lounging around, reading books and spooning cake crumbs into our mouths.

9/9

Since we're five months into the year I figured it was about time to join a book challenge. Last year it was the Booker Challenge, and this year it's 999 from Goodreads - read nine books in nine categories. Shouldn't be too tough. Here's my list.

1. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (Historical Fiction)
2. Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell (Non-Fiction)
3. Like You’d Understand Anyway – Jim Shephard (Short Stories)
4. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With – Sherry Turkle, ed. (Essays)
5. My Mother, My Self – Nancy Friday (Feminism/Psychology)
6. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out Of Desire – Helen Vendler (Literary Criticism)
7. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer – James Swanson (History)
8. Winter’s Bone - Daniel Woodrell (Contemporary Fiction)
9. Butcher’s Crossing – John Williams (The American West)

I admit to being a bit lukewarm on some of these books, namely the essays and the Nancy Friday book, but I should read them so this is a way to get me to do it. I'm reading The Crimson Petal now and it's quite good, but since it's 894 pages long I resisted putting David Copperfield on the list. I think it's even longer. I'd like to read it "in the near future," but I'm not making any written commitments. Of course there are a bunch of poetry books I'd like to read, but everything I have, I've read, and I don't know when I'll get a new batch.

Charmi's doing the challenge with me, I hope. If you're on Goodreads and want to join, please join!

What I Read in the Paper

Everything about sand storms and aircraft and sleep.
Everything about offshore.
About fires wailing across the west.
Great amounts of wheat.
Everything about drones and rooftops.
The moon on the rooftops.
The moon’s poverty on the rooftops.
Attention. Details.
About face.

paintball

I didn't know what it was. I didn't want to know what it was. But it seemed to come up so often I couldn't avoid eventually finding out what it was - like waterboarding, back in the day. Except I thought waterboarding was a water sport, and it turned out to be an "advanced interrogation method." And I thought paintball must be something like skee ball, but it turned out to be a advanced form of torture.

the smell of worn pennies

I finished John Banville’s The Book of Evidence a couple days ago. I really enjoyed it, mostly because I enjoy despair and self-loathing, especially if it’s couched in a good story by writer with a fabulous vocabulary.

Banville is the saint of sumptuous sentences. Check this out:
“I drank my drink. There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.”

Okay, that’s three sentences. It’s mostly the center one I mean, but also the sequencing - 1) the simple set-up, 2) the sensual ravishing, and 3) the kill-off - is masterful.

I did a somewhat longer gush on Goodreads, but here I mostly want to point out his mastery of the “as if” construction.

1. “I had not thought paper would make so much noise, such scuffling and rattling and ripping, it must have sounded as if some large animal were being flayed alive in here.”

2. “His left eyelid began to flutter as if a moth had suddenly come to life under it.”

3. “She drove very fast, working the controls probingly, as if she were trying to locate a pattern, a secret formula, hidden in this mesh of small deft actions.”

4. “Her pale colouring and vivid hair and long, slender neck gave her a startled look, as if some time in the past she had been told a shocking secret and had never quite absorbed it.”

5. “When I spoke to her the poor girl turned crimson, and winclingly extended a calloused little paw as if she were afraid I might be going to keep it.”

6. “I have always loved that hour of the day, when that soft, muslin light seeps upward, as if out of the earth itself, and everything seems to grow thoughtful and turn away.”

I recommend this book (although Athena is better). I warn you that the murder is horrible and sad. Also, the characters are horrible and/or pathetic. A lot of reviews I read complained the main character was too despicable. Still, I recommend the book to anyone who thinks the “general awfulness of everything” can be redeemed by art.

donnez moi pour toujours une chambre à la semaine

How long have I been telling my mother that someday we'd visit Paris when she's here? Well, finally I booked train tickets and rented an apartment for two nights. It'll pass as a Mother's Day present, although we won't be going until the end of May. Whatever! Beautiful city, Paris is. Can't wait to tell her.

Thanks to Carlo, who speaks French, and who argued for staying over rather than just going in the morning and coming back at night.
And thanks to the kids, who promise to cooperate in sightseeing without too much complaint.

Image courtesy of Montreal photographer Irene S.

morning meeting

There’s nothing worse than showing up for the daily huddle with your fly undone.
You could show up with some funky bedhead and it wouldn’t be as bad as arriving with your fly undone.
You could come with a button unbuttoned and folks would just think oh you know he fumbled and it wouldn’t be as obliviously embarrassing as showing up with your fly undone.
You could come with an untied shoe and your boss would point it out without a problem because it’s not as delicate a matter as having your fly undone.
You could arrive with poppy seeds and cream cheese between all your teeth and it wouldn’t be as bad as huddling with your fly undone.
Ok wait yes it would be as bad it would be worse because coming with your fly undone is human but coming with poppy seeds and cream cheese between all your teeth is inhuman.
And if you came with your shirt on inside-out it would indicate there’s something seriously wrong, not just rampant neglect or a simple hurry but something worse than blowing off brushing your teeth or arriving with your silly fly undone.

goldfinger

When I still lived in America, it was my job to ensure that the square footage of wall-to-wall carpeting accounted for a minimum of 18% of all geographic surface area, not including Alaska and Hawaii. I went all around the country in my donkey cart measuring this. I liked to start in hotels, virtual layer cakes of carpeting. As I gained experience, it got so I could calculate everything in my head, without using my ruler. I just multiplied the number of floors and subtracted the bathrooms. Throw rugs and orientals, popular in the nicer hotel lobbies, didn’t count. This was a job to be done barefoot, to connect with all textures – the high or low pile, woolens and shags. In homes and convention centers, churches and offices, I went around on all fours with my ruler and my recoiling fiberglass measuring tape. I saw carpeting the color of corn and of ruby and every shade of beige. I saw shoes, and sandals holding painted toenails. Sometimes I pocketed a sprung button or key. I found the pits of fruit under couches and spied mucho chewing gum under movie theater seats. I saw coffee stains, red wine and juice splashes and puke and dried peas and I was enriched by the presidents’ faces I saw embossed on a million lost coins and I know wall-to-wall carpeting isn’t the only thing that makes America great.

all the old fevers

I have a poem called Monarchs in the new issue of DMQ Review. The artwork in this issue leans towards the comic, but it works. I particularly like the pieces they matched with the poems Naked Air, and The Secret Language of Feet. If you click on the artist's name on the homepage, he'll explain what canaries mean.

abandoned dancing

books in my bookbag
the book of evidence – john banville (p 91)
the complete posthumous poems – cesar vallejo (“my chest wants and does not want”)
the manifest destiny of desire – jennifer key

treat
yesterday I bought myself the pendant pictured here from a woman who likes to break plates. Here’s her shop. I also like to break things, but lighting my hair on fire often seems more appropriate. Can’t do it as often.

discovery
this looks like the 4th issue of sixth finch, but it’s my first. The poetry is good, but what’s really cool about this ezine is the artwork. Instead of combining poems with images, everything gets its own page. I like that. In this issue, I especially like S, J and J. I admit to being lured in by the initials. I like the retro of it, the matte. I like the framing by branches, buildings and water. The temperature looks perfect. But mostly I like the energy. Have these people just been shot? Are they doing some absolutely abandoned dancing? Are they gymnasts? Who the hell knows but pass me a daquiri and I’ll pull up my park bench for the duration.

morning shuffle
the book of right-on – joanna newsom
flowers of guatemala – rem
any major dude – steely dan
who by fire – leonard cohen
motorcycle mama – neil young

ill fiction

The EU will no longer use the term "swine flu," it says, because it gives the wrong impression about the safety of pork. Okay. This of course has to do with the subsidies poured into the agriculture/livestock industries. Instead they will call it "novel flu." Lame, and apparently they don't give a shit about booksellers.

You will also no longer be able to get the chicken pox, salmonella or bird flu. Scarlet fever will turn some other color, preferably a shade not found in fruit. You'd think they'd devote more time to finding new terms for illnesses that are really offensive, like genital warts.

switch to diminish

I have two poems in the new issue of Hobble Creek Review - Ghazal at Ebbtide and Inside the Little Picture. Hobble Creek does poems of place, and it's an interesting issue that also includes Rachel Mallino, Nic Sebastian and CE Chaffin. I was happy to have some poems accepted there.

My mother tells me it will reach 88 degrees F over in NJ today, and since heat figures in the poem Inside the Little Picture, here's the top of it -

Inside the Little Picture

In the kitchen, I’m fishing pieces
of cork rot from the bottle’s throat,
as if a little care and precision
could cure the world of its decreptitude.

coat perfect fits

My poem yesterday was about Monopoly pieces. I still need to do the wheelbarrow, the shoe and the cannon, and spruce up the top hat.

I’ve never enjoyed Monopoly. It takes too long and it’s mean spirited. Nevertheless, on those occasions when I’ve had my arm twisted, my parental guilt stirred, or just lacked an excuse for not being available, I usually choose one of the homier tokens to be me on the board, ie the wheelbarrow, the shoe or the thimble. Of course, pyschologically, this reveals my lack of ambition. I never want to be the cannon because it’s obnoxious. And the iron, although among the homey pieces, looks too fragile. I’m lukewarm on the others. I read on the Hasbro site that the race car was voted the all-time favorite piece. Keep in mind the people who vote on that are the people who like Monopoly.

After the selection of the totem vehicle, Monopoly falls apart for me. It’s no fun unless you’re winning. And if you find winning Monopoly a pleasure, you’re something of a sadist.

When I moved to Germany it was disturbing to find out how the Monopoly street names were German streets! No more Marvin Gardens, no Park Place, no Baltic Avenue. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it made the game all the less appealing. I mean, if I couldn’t visit the old haunts…

the end of asparagus

I have so few poems out, I’ve been browsing around for places to submit. This morning I found an ezine that doesn’t want any “love conquers all” poems. Many journals also warn against sending in erotic poetry, greeting card verse, political rant or patriotic poetry, religious poetry, Bukowski imitations, children’s verse, light verse and genre poetry, such as sci-fi or horror.

Still, it could be amusing to read hybrids. Like a Bukowski imitation with a shot of religion, such as “Shit-Faced with the Big Guy.” Or a Hallmark science fiction poem. Or a political rant for children. Or light horror, preferably involving zombies.

I’d also like to see unacceptable sorts mixed with acceptable sorts, like a surreal patriotic poem. “My Country At The End Of Asparagus.”

Or experimental greeting card verse. Anything but erotic greeting card verse, which has been done, and badly enough already.

there goes the neighborhood

This morning in the half-dark of the park, the crazy tin-can man was making the rounds again, rifling through the garbage bins for deposit bottles. As usual he was talking to himself. It sounded like he was saying “Arbeit macht klein” (work makes you small), which I thought was pretty amusing, until I realized he was saying “Arbeit macht frei,” which was still somewhat funny considering the guy was “at work.” Still, a day after Hitler’s birthday, it’s creepy. Then I thought I heard him shouting “Sleep tight! Sleep tight!” but when I looked over I saw he was doing the Nazi salute and what he must have been saying was “Sieg Heil,” which is not only creepy but also illegal. Well, this was a side of the tin-can man I'd never seen before. I didn’t call the police...

This guy used to scare the crap out of me when I was out in the early hours with the dog, then it seemed he was harmless. Now I think I’ll let myself be scared again. Unfortunately the dog cowers behind me when she's frightened, making us strike an even more pathetic figure than either of us could on our own.

what sleep sounds like

I’ve been writing a poem every day and it’s not going so badly. Not that I’ve written anything of much value, but it hasn’t yet turned into fruitless torture. Yesterday I wrote a poem that ended with “Set your pirate to vibrate.” After walking the dog this morning I wrote a poem in which the sound of birds in the park by my house is compared to those big water coolers that light the corners of dusty offices.

I mentioned once before reading a review of a book about a woman who was cured of deafness in her 20’s or 30’s. People asked her what she found to be the worst sound and she said a crying baby. The best was birdsong. My favorite sound has always been the sound of water – either flowing in a stream, or raining, or bathwater sloshing around. I also like the glug glug of the water cooler, kind of clownlike and floppy, and in a weird way a combination of moving water with birdsong. At least that was what I thought this morning walking the dog in the rain.

I’m away for the weekend, listening to the Rhine, which sleep sounds like.

put your money on orchids

According to my sources, today is Blog Reader Appreciation Day, which goes to show how crazy the world has gone. I've tried to crosscheck this, but according to this site, it's actually National Eggs Benedict Day, and I am trying to remember if that involves spinach.
Nevertheless, thanks for reading my blog. And if you are reading my blog please stop now and go read Nic Sebastian's Very Like a Whale, where she reviews my chapbook In the Voice of a Minor Saint.

My thoughts about boots

My thoughts about boots are this: boots are good.

rain rubs the spoons

There's a tea shop in town that sells the very sexy teas of Mariages Freres. I visited there often about a year ago just to smell the teas, and rub the leafy crumbs around in my fingers. I wrote some poems about the different varieties, but then threw most of them away, leaving a series of fragments. The short series is up today at Fraglit, a journal of fragmentary writing.

& in case the tea's too bitter, have it with some hilarious cake.

in which the straw outsmarts us

Expressions let the Germans make the dumb among them even dumber than elsewhere. The most common simile expressions with "dumb" are dumm wie Stroh, or dumb as straw, and dumm wie Brot, or dumb as bread.
Compared to the Germans, the English expressions seem dull. What do we have? Dumb as a post, which nobody uses, and dumb as an ox.
Ok, a post is dumb, but if you put a piece of bread in a bowl of warm water you'll see that it's much stupider. Straw, to take it further, is surely the dumbest of the dumb. It looks dumb, and it just lies around collecting Schmutz.
I find the expression dumm wie Brot particularly hilarious. Do you think one day someone was just staring at a piece of bread and it dawned on him that bread is not very smart?
Of course in English we also say dumb as hell, but we use this noun too much, revealing a poverty of imagination. Hot as hell, cold as hell, expensive as hell, ugly as hell, or, for variety, shit - dumb as shit, ugly as shit... etc! Kind of loses its punch, no?
Of all these -bread, straw, post and ox- the ox must surely be the least dumb. If all these dumb things got together, he'd surely be named leader.
G.K. Chesterton wrote a book about St. Thomas Aquinas called "Dumb Ox." Here's the blurb - notice how straw weasels its way into the story...
'This brilliant sketch of the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1933. It will introduce the wondrous mystery of the man who, after a life of unparalleled genius, was seized by a vision of Our Lord and said, "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw." St. Albert the Great said of Aquinas, "You call him a Dumb Ox; I tell you that the Dumb Ox will bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world!"'

reply all

I was at the social security counseling center today. I'd come armed with documents. I had diplomas and birth certificates. I had proof of previous unemployment. I had my American accent and German grammar. I had my residence permit, the deed to my house and all my teeth. Pay stubs. I had my high school transcript. I had the approval for two maternity leaves. I had trouble explaning Italy. I'd had trouble understanding Italy, though there was a shop on the other side of the Via Manzoni that just clicked. I’d brought a picture of me in a bikini. The counseler asked me about my husband. I tried spelling that. Damn, he wasn’t making it easy. He asked me if I was an artist and I asked why that. Because I was wearing the same socks and underwear as yesterday? I don’t change that quickly. Even as we spoke I was racking up brownie points. I didn’t tell him about the poem in my bookbag about a pornographic spatula, and he wasn't bright enough to ask.

now i become scientifically tired

I have two poems in the new issue of Literary Bohemian. One is clumped into one wadded stanza; the other is chopped up irregularly like salad greens.

It was warm here today, but I was dressed nicely in a blouse and my daughter was crying on the phone. I must admit that a little shopping and some jelly beans solved her problems, at least temporarily. That's the way it is with problems.

get out your apeshit

I don't really care about the vernal equinox or the muds of late March; for me, the first day of spring is always April 1. Of course it's also the start of National Poetry Month, when everybody gets out their apeshit spacesuits and starts writing. I'm hoping to do the same, though I recently finished a 30-day challenge that left me gasping. The Poetic Asides blog is offering an online challenge I had hoped to participate in. But at 2 pm in the European afternoon, the daily prompt had not yet appeared, making mine a poem-in-less-than-half-a-day challenge, which is overly challenging for someone who turns off the lights at 9 pm. The rules allow you to catch up, ie you can post your poem for any (and every) day anytime before New York midnight Apr. 30. But that's not really poem-a-day, now is it?

Anyway, none of this is important. The only important thing in Emmanuel Polanco, the collage artist who provided the image for my chapbook. He has all kinds of ravishing new things up on his site, not the least of which is a series of raven collages inspired by E.A. Poe.

i'm gonna buy you a superball

Whenever I see Hello Kitty I think of the day I spent in Japan. I was traveling from China to New Jersey and my connecting flight got canceled. The airline bussed us out to a Tokyo hotel, where I made the acquaintance of two mustachioed oriental rug dealers who were on the same small flight.

We marveled at the shot-size cans of coke sold in the vending machine outside the restaurant. I really wanted one, full or empty, but all I had was a restaurant voucher.

In my hotel room, when I spread my arms out in bed, I could touch the opposite walls. In terms of floor space, the largest area was under the chair tucked under the desk, where I stashed my purse.

I can’t begrudge the pinch. Of the 16,500 days in my life, I’ve only had room for one day in Japan.

A lot of people have asked what my position is regarding Hello Kitty. To me she is like those little coke cans. One of the rug dealers bought one. Drinking it, he planted his bowtie mustache on its small head. This was the mouth-watering birth of Hello Kitty in my imagination, even though at that time she hadn’t been invented yet.

I don’t know Hello Kitty personally but when I see her on my infrequent jaunts through accessories I think of my tiny night in Japan. Not even room for a comma.

friday confession

Ages ago when I got a blackberry for work I used it only for email and occassionally for phoning. But since it's always in my purse and set to vibrate, if someone is calling me, I don't know until I check.
Anyway, my confession has nothing to do with that. It has to do with brick breaker. Like I said, ages ago, I had as little to do with my blackberry as possible. But about two weeks ago I started playing brick breaker. I don't know why. I had played it once or twice before and found it such a boring timesuck that I never gave it a second thought. But suddenly I was playing, and making such great leaps score-wise that my son called me a "freak" in a way he obviously considered a compliment.
But you know, I waste so much time already. In the time I spent ruining my eyesight aiming a blinking ball at some bricks, I could have finished one of the books I'm supposedly reading but actually very actively not reading.
Boy, I feel better already! I'm already on the road to recovery. This guy, however, is not.

and all the blackbirds

I had a freeing experience the other day. I heard about a woman who married the Eiffel Tower. She belongs to a small group of people in love – committed, romantic love - with objects. This interested me. I felt the whole world open up. I figured that although I’m married, I could enter into tantalizing, emotionally uncomplicated affairs. For example, there’s this green Mercedes sometimes parked around the corner that I adore. I say it offhand – love - but I don’t even like Mercedes and, usually, if you told me your car was leafgreen I’d say you’re a twit. I am also a lifelong lover of Chanel 5 and it occurs to me now that if I had married this fragrance instead of a man, I might have gone more lightly and confidently about life. There are a number of poetry books I’m secretly and repeatedly seeing on side, i.e. no matter what the main course is, one of these is tucked in my purse or bookbag or next to my bed. There’s a Syrah I could without qualms promise to love, honor and obey. The smell of gasoline. A certain watering can. Chagall’s “I and the Village.” The Great Wall of China. Seriously, I’ve found a new frame for these enriching relationships. It’s like I could live many times, or all over again.

red-headed godchild

I don’t know a poet who likes being compared to another poet. It suggests stealing and, worse, a lack of originality. I’m sure many women poets can recall at one point or other being likened to either Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. Maybe because both expressed feelings about the self, statis, marriage, the urge to negate, entrapment, isolation, etc etc that most people have - from a woman’s point of view. But, style-wise, to have someone say “this seems a homage to Sexton” is like having your mouth plugged with sand, even if it’s meant as a compliment. And yet so many book jackets say, “Her poems evoke Plath . . .”

But perhaps more uncomfortable than being compared to a poet is being compared to two poets simultaneously, eg “It’s like Charles Simic making love to Syliva Plath over a place of oysters.” Or “His poems are a cross between Baudelaire and an Asian Jack Kerouac,” or “This is what Charles Bukowski would write if he were a ventriloquist for a drunken H.D.” That makes these unlikely pairs, and they're always unlikely, into the poet's parents! Not the best blurb, but often funny.

Wait until they start bringing in the siblings, cousins, stepparents and neighbors.

i arrived disheveled in my johnny cash pants

The Literary Bohemian has done a review of my chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint. I do hope you'll tune in. The review includes a reprint of the shortest poem in the book, "Please Remove my Name." As always, based on a true story.
I mentioned a couple weeks back that The Literary Bohemian took two poems of mine for its April 1 issue. The editor has now taken some of my wine blurbs for the summer issue. I will be looking both ways when I cross that street today.

baby you're a rich man, too

Three poems I've enjoyed recently:
Certain Homes
Windshelf
The Pencil

the cheese stands alone

Can it really be that Friday will be another Friday the 13th? Didn’t we just have one of those?
Actually I’m not superstitious. But I have my tics.
Like if I get a certain number of points in a video game I will do well in my job. Or if I make it up the escalator before the song on my iPod ends, someone besides me will remember to buy milk. Or if ten cars make it through the light before it turns red, I’ll get the email I’m hoping for. If my right foot is first up the curb, “everything,” whatever that is, will be fine. But the stride must remain natural. It can’t look like I’m trying to get my right foot up the curb first. This requires some planning. If the cheese rinds are facing the outside of the cheeseplate, ie arranged as rounded petals, my home will be standing after the flood. Sometimes I’m writing a submission letter and I type a phrase and get the feeling if I use that phrase, my poems will be rejected. I try to fight this, but I usually lose. Voluntarily.
Anyway, superstitious I’m not. And the Friday part eqalizes the 13th part.

I wear fangs and drive a vespa

Yesterday I got up, brushed my teeth, fixed my hair, did my face, walked the dog, made coffee, drank coffee, punched my blackberry, ironed pants, got dressed, got to the door with my bag, my keys and my headache, turned around and sent my boss an email saying I was going back to bed, which I did, dressed, coiffed and caffeinated, taking a moment to remove my boots. Altogether this took about 50 minutes.

That apologetic email would have been the highlight of my day if Weave Magazine hadn’t posted a review of my chapbook. Thank you! Also my olde workshoppee poetess friend Brenda put some nice words about my chap up on her blog. Thanks again!

I feel better today.

ein Schiff mit acht Segeln

I have some poems out in print journals I thought I'd mention, as well as other poem news. As this may become rather dull for you, I have organized video entertainment, ie Lotte Lenya singing a Kurt Weill song. Please push play.

Issue 2 of Barn Owl Review has “Etiquette.” This is a poem about trying to be polite. It involves clam dip and cigarettes, too.

Bateau (2.1) published two poems – “Reading Kolyma Tales” and “Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over.” The former is about reading the book Kolyma Tales, kind of, in case you couldn’t guess. The latter comes from an explainer column in the NYTimes about why pregnant women don’t tip over. In other words, the titles of these poems are very apt.

John Wang has also let me know that he included two of my poems in the Juked #6 print anthology: “Rainmaker” and “I Will Now Eat a Loaf of Bread.” It’s too complicated even for me to explain what these poems are about.

Otherwhere, I got a couple rejections recently from Silk Road and Elimae.
But The Literary Bohemian took two poems for its next issue: "The Snow is an Intelligence Officer" & "On Stopping To Smell Perfume On the Way Home From Work." Both of those titles are self-explanatory.
Also Fraglit, a very interesting conceptual journal, took a series of poem fragments called “Tea Leaves.” It’s about tea, believe it or not.
And Hobble Creek Review took two poems: “Ghazal at Ebbtide” and “Inside the Little Picture.” Rachel Mallino will also have a couple poems in this issue, so all the more reason to read.

I will surely flag these pubs when they appear…

the chase scene

People are always moaning about writer’s block but nobody ever complains about reader’s block.
Writing makes some big demands on a person.
In reading, on the other hand, you’re not asked to do much more than pay attention.
And yet you arrive slack-jawed at the bottom of the page and go, “what?”
Doesn’t it make you feel like the most despicable failure
to have to travel back up the page and start again?
For goodness’ sake!

when wonderful, add water

The good thing about this blouse is it fits.

(removed for maintenance!)

austerity chic

Every day I'm more uneasy how steeply things are lurching downward. No one wants to hear this and I don't want to hear it either but I work in news and it's all I hear. Pretty soon we'll all be huddled in our dark empty cupboards, teeth chattering.
We'll be reduced to rags and eating polenta.
Whenever I think frugal I think polenta. The last time I ate polenta was in Italy on an agriturismo vacation. The polenta was grey - grey as if it had sucked all the smog from Milan. Even if things get worse, I won't eat any more polenta. My Italian husband agrees: no way.
I know some people think polenta is chic, but in more ways than one it's the culinary equivalent of burlap.

wandered lamb-like

I’ve been very busy with numbers. It’s not a one-sided thing – we’ve both needed some organizing. I was at parents’ night for my son’s class last night. Of 33 parents, 22 were women, and of those six had dyed their hair blond. It’s very original. Even one of the fathers dyed his hair blond. And part of his beard. It’s contagious. Designing pie charts was the only thing that saved me from parents' night tedium. Even words are taking a backseat these days. For example, describing the 5th graders, the teacher used the word lammfromm. This means pious, or meek, as a lamb. But the interesting thing about lammfromm is how many Ms come in the package. Four out of nine letters. What’s that, 44%? Some words seem more like numbers than words. They’re solutions to problems. Lammfromm, for example, is gorgeously symmetrical and could be the answer to a lot of the world’s long, multi-tiered problems. For starters, it would take us far in peace agreements.

Anyway, if you’ve been trying to reach me, even telepathically, I’ve been busy calculating.

bell letters

dear meryl streep,
We adore you. You’re exquisite. But why’d you accept that role in Mamma Mia? We enjoyed watching you, but think it was a foolish decision. So what if you’re not young anymore. Who is?

dear very pregnant lady on the bus,
Hello, and please don’t be discouraged. Also clouds assume oddball shapes, but their progress is smoother than any boat on any lake.

dear ritter sport chocolate bar,
Alongside pustefix, you remain one of the few german upsides. I thank god america hasn’t discovered you. I have so few secrets.

dear pablo picasso,
I’ve been seeing your stuff since the day I was born and must admit I’ve been impressed. I remember viewing Nude Woman in a Red Armchair at the Tate and thinking the man is a genius. But still you seem like an egotistical bastard. Is that true? Modigliani, on the other hand ... soul galore!

dear president obama,
That’s it – just dear p.o. Because I’m glad to write it.

dear candle wax,
Stop corrupting my children with that hot slick. Every time I turn around they’ve plugged you with a weepy finger.

what it was supposed to be like

It was supposed to be a cool, shadowy hallway laid with an oriental runner. Doors would be open up and down, and sometimes the scent of something – say grapefruit or paraffin – would move through like a passing mood. But of course it wasn’t like that. Often it was noisy, and smelled of glue or smoke, or burnt milk.

sardinia

Threw the Book at Him

Unlike the free world, you can’t name your kid anything you want in Germany. It has to be a recognized name that’s appropriate to the child’s sex and not dreamed up on your last gin bender. Thus there is no Moon Unit or 4Real; and no, unlike a New Jersey couple, you can’t name your child Adolf Hitler. The only exception is for foreigners. I was allowed to name my son Miles because as a foreigner I’m not subject to the great book of names. (I do have to suffer the very original joke about Lufthansa’s frequent flier program in regard to Miles’s name, but by not laughing I try to teach by example.)

Although German parents can’t name their kids Apple, there aren’t restrictions on how many names they can give him/her/it. This struck me today as the country got a new economics minister named Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. Especially charming is the last name “von und zu Guttenberg,” meaning “from and to Guttenberg.” He can’t decide. All those names have confused him.

Kind of makes you dizzy, no? And a little sick to your stomach?

ange barbu

Last week we visited friends in Bad Honnef, a town on the Rhine where we've been many times, and my friend Ursula casually mentioned she'd passed a plaque in town saying Guillaume Apollinaire had lived there briefly more than a hundred years ago. Needless to say we set out to find it. Wherever he actually lived is quite gone, as some semi-modern apartments now stand behind the plaque.

Sleepy Bad Honnef, Germany seems an unlikely place for a pioneering French poet. I asked Ursula why on earth Apollinaire was living there. She explained "It's pretty here!"

Lycra-like Trampoline

Some people insist every poem needs its own title, as if you were naming a baby. Personally I don’t mind if a poem goes around as “Untitled,” although, of course, a title lets the poet determine how the poem is identified. Don’t title it and you run the risk of readers coming up with something like “the poem with sleet in it,” or “the dead baby poem.” Who wants that? Luckily, default will usually kick in and the poem will be identified by its first line, à la e.e. cummings.

On the other side are poets who use the same title over and over, like Louise Glück in Wild Iris. This makes identifying the poem even harder than leaving it untitled. There’s “Matins page 2,” “Matins page 3,” page 12, 13, 25, etc. Hey, they were all good, but which one are we talking about?

In my book, anything would be preferable to calling a poem “Poem.” As if there were only one!

There’s a poet I know who hates long titles. I admit this can come off as gimmicky, but usually I find it a draw. A poem called “Poem in Which the Clairvoyant Gives In and Sells Her Internal Organs to Buy the Lycra-like Trampoline” would pique my interest more than “Snow.” (At least initially.) The danger here is the reader enters with big expectations. If the poem is a let-down, an extraordinary title won’t save it. It will only make the let-down worse.

I thought such long titles were rare but a recent cull of Verse Daily turns up a bunch of them. If any of these intrigue you, go forth and prosper.

"Brought to You by the Letter Ox , Or: Why I Want my Son to Remain Illiterate" by Mitchell Metz

"The Blackmailer's Wife Reads History and Considers the Nature of Guilt" by Judy Brown

"The Poem You Hang on Your Wall Like a Painting Because It Does Something Different Each Time the Light" by Timothy Kelly

"Speedy Inexpensive Chaos Theory Poem About Short Term Memory Loss" by Peggy Munson

"I Am Talking Dirty to You Like You are the Only One in the Room" by Danielle Pafunda

"On a Woodpecker Drinking from a Knothole Still Full of the Last Rain" by Maurice Manning

(this post is up over at linebreak's blog, too)

the past, there you have it

Like many blonde children I was born royal but abducted by envious pygmy bunnies and taken to keep their warren clean. They pecked me, and did not pay well. Still I was able to learn three languages, including bird slang of the western hemisphere. When I got too big the bunnies left me with with the management of Sloat’s Tavern in Scranton, PA in exchange for a purse of chocolate coins wrapped in tinfoil. The man who became my father swept up the tavern. He was a music critic who hated the phrase “head cheese” and his parents were bartenders beset by moods. My greatgrandfather was a tap-dancing Dane who died of typhoid fever while doing the vaudeville circuit. He introduced yoga to the US. but they hid this fact from me, thinking I’d be too full of myself to continue the flute lessons if I knew.