Blue Hills and Citrus Dreams

Yesterday I got to hear this reflection on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on his actual birthday, and to serve cupcakes to my mom (at our poetry workshop) on her actual birthday.

The reflection ends with Wendell Berry's wonderful "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," for all you local food and back-to-the-earthers! And then we were invited to offer a one-sentence "dream" we might include in our own manifestos. Some of those are in the comments section, and you can leave one of your own, if you like, and if you will sign your name to it. Do you have a dream?

In poetry news, the beginning-of-the-year rejections are rolling in, along with various bits of good news, and new poems are creeping out from the smoke of the smudge pots. I was not a winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest, but I was a Special Merit finalist (back to being a bridesmaid for me!), and have 2 poems forthcoming in anniversary issues of the Comstock Review.

I can't help but be glad for the winner, Lucinda Grey, and look forward to receiving her winning chapbook The Blue Hills: Poems After the Life of Maud Gonne, which sounds intriguing, Yeatsian, historical, and actressy, all coincidences of the sort I like. I do appreciate it when contest entrants receive the winning book.

And how wonderful that Jonathan Koch is now offering some of his gorgeous art on notecards! See them and get them in his Store!