Saturday, November 18, 2006

interval

bead and brighten, swaggering lifestamp. if you hate the piccolo so much, its shrill stampede of vibrato, then why have you swallowed the octave? like you had me, all inside and intonated. now barely breathing and tingled, so heavy your smallest participles. your gangly hyperboles have lost their shimmer. I’m surprised by the altitude, it’s pressure, it’s ability to change the sound of your voice. from soliloquy to monotone, heading further away.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

astonishing discovery. . .

apparently if you google the phrase "I miss Chicago," my blog is the 71st result. I'm not sure how I feel about that. . .

from the dead (walking)

I finally updated my blogroll and added some peeps who should have been there all along. I still have a long way to go.

News from Scott the other day says some work form our collaborative project, "helixes" is to appear in Sugar Mule, guest edited by Sheila Murphey. I'm not sure of the details, but I think the issue focus on collaboration as a poetic genre, or something of the sort, so it's pretty exciting to be included, not to mention, it will surely be a seriously kick-butt production.

I'm lucky enough to be a featured poet on MiPoesias this month (bottom of the page. . .but don't scroll too quickly-- there's good stuff in here!). They chose some prose poems, which is very promising. Also, you can catch me reading a new poem, "fascicles," on bob macacci's poetry podcast, THE COUNTDOWN, also associated with MiPOesias. Thanks, Bob and Didi. It's great!

I'm headed to Chicago on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to meet with teachers and see what they make of the first draft of my dissertation. I'm not sure what to expect, but hoping for the best. I'm most interested to see if they think there's a possibility that I could graduate in May. I'm pretty eager to wrap this thing up, especially now that I'm so far away (in so many ways. . .).

I've been submitting to several places that I've been putting off for a long time, I'm not sure why. Seems like time. It's exciting and frightening to bu putting my new work out there, mostly because I like it so much, which is rare for me and my poetry. I usually see some merit in it, but don't feel a specific affinity towards it. These new pieces, mostly prose poems, are something I'm proud of. . .something I can defend and stand up for. They make up the preponderence of my dissertation, and I'm also quite pleased with the way they string together in a larger collection. I'm excited to begin assembling this collection as a book manuscript and sending it out for the November/ December deadlines. Why not, right?

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

fascicles

she couldn’t find it there, in the woven and swollen birch bark. damn the choosing rhymes, their flavorful, ghastly whine. buckle. three, four. she is fastened tightly with portrait stamps, wound around her knuckles. faces lost to damp adhesion. war into day. and more days. you are a different child. than the one we lost. liquefy and shed. we take drastic measures to hide those words. will I cast my lot. will it end up solid, growing and vehicular, in this, the most desperate of sunsets?