Winebulance

1) I ran out of wine.  2) I posted an excerpt from the journal of EIL founder Chris Al-Aswad over at Escape Into Life that amazingly matches the, uh,...plot of Middletown. I may have to pull a Librarian and read it to the cast...  It's Good Friday?

Librarians for Marriage Equality

It's Thor's Day in the blog: I'm for marriage equality, and I love libraries. I'm not a librarian, but I play one on tv stage. I realized yesterday that I had played a librarian as Sara, who is also a poet, in Earth and Sky, by Douglas Post. And, of course, Marian the Librarian in The Music Man. Not to mention, um, though I just did, the Librarian in Middletown.

I was in Earth in Sky at the Theater of the Open Eye in New York, founded by Jean Erdman, a dancer and choreographer and theatre director, who was also the wife of Joseph Campbell, mythology guy I love! I remember reading the plaque on the wall when we were rehearsing and realizing where I was!

What I realized today is that Jean Erdman danced The One Who Speaks in Letter to the World with Martha Graham's dance company--that is, Emily Dickinson! Who gnu? So, definitely, it's also a Random Coinciday in the blog! OK, also? Jean Erdman and I have the same birthday!! This makes me inordinately happy.

Thanks to good old Wikipedia for everything and to derekkeats in particular for the dancing gnu, aka black wildebeest.

Good Luck

I always feel like one of the lucky ones in life: I am loved. I can love. I do love. Know what I mean?

Yes, I'm a melancholic. But we have a deep capacity for joy, too. In case you were wondering.

Anyhoo, I always feel lucky when I find the artist to match the poet in our Escape Into Life poetry features. The new poet up today is Luisa A. Igloria, who has been writing a poem a day for a really long time over at Via Negativa. But she had some poems to spare! So I snapped them up.

In pairing her with an artist, I was looking for color, especially yellow and blue and green, and for transparency, and I found them all in Markus Åkesson. You can go see, but here's an example: the first stanza of "Dragon."

It’s said luck follows those
born in the year of the fire-breather,
a time blue with the sticky, fluted
scales of rain-moths.

See the rain moths?! See what I mean? Synchronicity out the wazoo. As I like to say.

As for me, I was born in the year of the cock (rooster) and am headed toward osteo-porosis, but I still feel lucky. Spring is coming, then summer, with lap swimming. And before that, April, the "cruellest month," with plenty of poetry, more art, and more swimmers. 

Till then, floating along, eyes on the skies.

Big Poetry Giveaway 2013

Speaking of getting my ducks in a row for National Poetry Month, I'm doing the Big Poetry Giveaway again, this year hosted by poet Susan Rich. If you are a poet/blogger, you can sign up here, at her blog, The Alchemist's Kitchen. If you like to read poetry and want to win a free book, you can participate whether or not you blog or write! Just leave a comment about which book you'd like to receive, and, in early May, I'll pull two names out of a basket, announce the winners, and mail a book to each. (You can send your mailing address by email; see Contact Info tab above.)

I'm giving away a copy of my most recent chapbook, Nocturnes (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012). It contains "night songs" and lyric poems, some published previously in After Hours, Blue Five Notebook (Blue Fifth Review), Fifth Wednesday, Poetry Porch, and Poems & Plays. Many thanks to these and other journals, and to Margaret Bashaar of Hyacinth Girl Press!

Another winner will receive They Say This, edited by one of my favorite poets, Richard Jones. This is a double issue of his journal Poetry East that constitutes an anthology of poems, essays on poetics, and short essays by contemporary poets praising books of poems they loved. They Say This contains poems by Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Thomas Lynch, Tess Gallagher, Gary Metras, Sam Hamill, and Hayden Carruth, and essays by Denise Levertov, Alice Fulton, Olga Broumas, Lucia Maria Perillo, and Gregory Dunne.

And many more!

They Say This brings together pieces from previous issues, including the out-of-print first Origins issue (#43) that I keep on a shelf over my writing desk, along with #55, a later collection of Origins: Poets on the Composition Process.

Soon, I can add another Origins issue, coming out this Spring! It will contain one of my own poems, "Damage," from Broken Sonnets, and a brief essay about its genesis.

I'm tickled pink.

Or, today, red. For Human Rights and Marriage Equality.

OK, so just comment below if you'd like a chance to win a free book. And say which, if you have a preference.

In the Bleak Middle of Why...

...oh why isn't it spring yet? (Background music: "In the Bleak Midwinter") Yes, we were dumped on. By 7-9 inches of snow, or, if you look at the picnic table heaped with snow in the back yard, about a foot. The roof is prettily drifted, like a swirled cake top. The driveway, however, was like a sheet cake. For a giant.

Not complaining, really. It's been a mild winter, and high temps are predicted, and this will melt and water the earth. My tulips are on their way up, day lilies, iris.

My pink and white begonias bloomed all winter long in pots in the house. All winter long!

That's Christina Rossetii. She wrote the poem that became the hymn, "In the Bleak Midwinter." Thank you again, Wikipedia.

Back to Middletown...