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Monday, March 25, 2013

Whoa, baby, that's some kind of growth spurt!

"Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink." - Dennis Overbye, The New York Times


Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize Submissions OPEN






Here's your chance to join the Saturnalia crew, outstanding authors such as Sarah Vap, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Natalie Shapero, & Margaret Ronda. This year's judge is Yusef Komunyakaa. Deadline is APRIL 1. 
Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize Guidelines
https://saturnaliabooks.submittable.com/submit
http://saturnaliabooks.com/?q=node/12
$2000 and publication by Saturnalia Books
2013 Judge = Yusef Komunyakaa

Electronic Submissions:
1. Manuscript must be an original work of poetry written in English.
2. Manuscript must be at least 48 pages in length (not including 
foreword material).
3. Author’s name and contact information must not appear on manuscript.
4. Acknowledgment page is optional. If your manuscript is a finalist, 
the acknowledgment page will be removed before it is sent to the judge.
5. No refunds will be given to any manuscripts withdrawn from the 
competition after April 1 deadline.
6. Former students who have studied "poetry writing" with the judge are 
ineligible to enter. Friends and family of the judge are also 
ineligible.
7. Contest winner will be announced in July on the Saturnalia Books 
website and via email. Please do not contact Saturnalia Books regarding 
your submission status before August 1.
If you are submitting online, the deadline is April 1 at 11:59 p.m.
Online submission link:
https://saturnaliabooks.submittable.com/submit

By Mail:
1. Manuscript must be an original work of poetry written in English.
2. Manuscript must be at least 48 pages in length (not including 
foreword material).
3. Author’s name and contact information must not appear on manuscript.
4. Manuscript sent by mail must be single-sided, and securely bound 
with a binder clip only.
5. Please include a separate cover sheet containing author’s name, 
title of manuscript, and contact information (including email address, 
street address, and phone number) as well as another cover sheet with 
only the title.
6. Acknowledgment page is optional. If your manuscript is a finalist, 
the acknowledgment page will be removed before it is sent to the judge.
7. Please include a check for $30 payable to Saturnalia Books. Entries 
without checks or with checks that are returned for insufficient funds 
will be immediately withdrawn.
8. Manuscripts must be postmarked by April 1. Do not send via any 
delivery method that requires a signature.
9. No refunds will be given to any manuscripts withdrawn from the 
competition after April 1.
10. Former students who have studied "poetry writing" with the judge 
are ineligible to enter. Friends and family of the judge are also 
ineligible.
11. Notification will be sent to your e-mail address. Do not include a 
self addressed stamped envelope (sase) unless you do not have an email 
address. If you do, it will be discarded.
12. Do not send your manuscript as registered, certified, or any other 
form of mail that requires a signature. It will be returned to you.
13. Contest winner will be announced in July on this site and via 
email. Please do not contact Saturnalia Books regarding your submission 
status before August 1.
Address submissions to: saturnalia books 105 Woodside Rd. Ardmore, PA 
19003
.
Manuscripts will be accepted beginning February 15, 2013.
__._,_.___

Friday, March 15, 2013

The Winner: House of Mystery Cover Art

Thanks for providing me with the loud and clear message that putting a photo of a weird house on the cover of my book is NOT going to fly. I really like Martha Rae Baker's "The Glass House" (see previous blog post), especially the colors/textures and the tree part, but ... it just didn't scream out mystery! I mean, it  took care of the "house" part but not the wacky, weird, unknowable parts of existence my book homes in on. Or maybe it did a little, but not enough.

So then I realized I have artist friends! Several! I contacted four of them, asking them to send work. David Graham, who is also a fine poet, sent me a link to his Instagram gallery, and I seriously considered using two of his photographs, "Paleo Egg" and "Window of Opportunity." (I would provide photos of these, but they are not downloadable as far as I can tell, and I don't want to make them freely available as I believe that would be copyright infringement?). "Paleo Egg" is this really cool photo of a transparent hand holding a ball covered with paleolithic handprints, sorta like some kind of Lascaux cave soccer ball. The other one, "Window of Opportunity," was of three windows, one half open, one mostly closed, and one completely closed over with bricks. These windows were working for me in terms of the unknowability of just about everything we encounter while we're alive (we're shut off from knowledge in the same way we can't see inside the window), but in terms of book covers, I felt I needed something more eye-catching, colorful, and recognizably mysterious. And then I saw this piece:



I decided to go with Russell Prather's "Circle of Fiends Ur Painting" for all of those reasons. Russell is a writer, a William Blake scholar, and a professor of English at Northern Michigan University, but he's also a talented visual artist who knows his Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, not to mention the visual artist side of Blake. Russ and I were both students at the University of Washington in the early 1990s. It has been amazing to watch his venture into creating visual art blossom over the last couple of decades, and I am delighted to provide his work with a wider audience.

Thanks so much for helping me realize the road my search needed to take. Stay tuned for the cover mock-ups (though it won't be till towards the end of summer).


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

House of Mystery Cover Art


Which of these weird-ass houses do you think would look best on the cover of my next book, House of Mystery? The book deals with mysteries large and small, everything from how we evolved, why we make art,  and why the hell humans are so dang adventurous, to where my mother's girdle went and disappeared to. There are poems about Saint Catherine, a disgruntled woman in search of a vacuum cleaner bag, Jesus and his miracles, Mona Lisa, Neanderthal humor, and the Voyager space probes leaving our "home" solar system, among others. Which of these images would work best, and why? Thanks for your help - I am having a tough time with choosing.









Monday, March 11, 2013

The Books & Mags & Swag of AWP13

I am too dazed and worn out to do more than take pictures of my loot this morning. If you have ever been at an AWP conference, I am sure you know the feeling. I promise to post some of the nine typed (single spaced) pages of notes I took during three days of incredible readings and panels about everything from teaching Larry Levis to the fact that Charles Simic and James Tate made up a literary magazine titled Gottesman's Curse, a magazine that never existed but had a courier named Elsa and involved lengthy correspondences between the two men. As Simic said, "the issues just kept getting more exciting!"

But right now I need to focus on unpacking my suitcase, doing laundry, and generally allowing my overdriven brain to take a wee nap. Well, not that that's truly possible when you have two kids and 50 students, but relative to six panels/readings a day, I feel like I'm lying by a Palm Springs pool sipping an icy Arnold Palmer.


Books Purchased at AWP 2013

My beloved Swag. My fav: Court Green's black condoms

Conduit has an interview with Buzz Aldrin in its Moon issue!

The never sideways Forklift, the little magazine that could and did

Speaking of condoms: The Sex Dossier