Slate Magazine Poetry Podcasts on iTunes

I came across this feature while searching around for food poems, one of my favorite pastimes. This one by Brenda Shaughnessy titled "Inappropriate Dreams" made me smile. Here's where all the podcasts live.

I love that Slate publishes not only poems, but audio versions of poems. Thanks, Slate!

Rattle Magazine: I Thank Thee

This time of year as I spread Christmas cheer by filling stockings with high-fives for books and magazines that most float my boat, I turn to Rattle Magazine, the lovely little magazine that just keeps getting better. Today's poem by Canadian poet Julie Bruck is is no exception. Thanks to the editors of Rattle, and to Julie for waking my brain and my belly laugh this cold December morning:

Julie Bruck

LOVE TO BUT

Our very important neighbor’s
fused to his new Cingular headset:
Now he can talk and walk.
Blah-blah-blah goes Mr. de Broff.
This makes it hard to hear
even the packs of feral dogs
howling all night, or the cats
doing what they do in our dark
fog-bound city gardens.
The world needs its chemistry
checked, that’s for sure.
The poisoned river is high,
fast at this time of year.
Fences between houses are down,
and we all like our boundaries.
Pharmacies? Closed.
All essential services, shut.
Time to fetch my daughter
from a birthday party which
ended in 1963, but she runs late.
Sometimes, I have to pry her
from the door-jamb, carry
her to the car like a small,
warm totem pole with sneakers.
A yellow Hummer slipped
through a crack in our street
on Tuesday: not seen nor
heard from since, despite
the crowd of looky-lu’s,
still milling around out there.
Love to. But these are
strange times. I could
expire before I meet
you at the gate. Yessir.
Love to. Toothache.
Can’t.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

~ Book of Kells: Confession Tuesday - Looking Back

~ Book of Kells: Confession Tuesday - Looking Back

Beginning again with horn, confetti, and tiara sounds good to me! I am glad that man saved you--I would not want a 2012 without you in this world. Have fun planning out your next year!

2011 Book Recommendations, Part 1: Prose

2011 was a good year for many reasons, one being that my kids have reached an age that allows me to read more books, and not just poetry books.

Don't get me wrong, I love poetry books, but I do love non-fiction too, along with the occasional novel.

The non-poetry books I read with gusto and glee in 2011 include:

Mary Karr's Lit 
Could not put it down. Sightseeing and AWP-ing in DC, I would pull it out and read a few pages every free chance I got. Riveting, harrowing, extremely well written.

Jim Harrison's True North 
An epic coming-of-age tale in the great American tradition of Wallace Stegner and related he-men-folk with heart and soul. Memorable characters, expansive scenery, and lots of philosophical musings to keep you chewing.

Laura Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fall-Out
I heard a review of this book on NPR in late 2010 and ran out and bought this; I've read it three times this year. Gorgeously luminous (literally and figuratively!). It's history; it's science; it's the heartbreaking romantic tale of two amazingly talented and productive individuals. Redniss deserves the National Book Award for this one (it's been nominated!). 

Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance
This book is worth it just for Leonardo's drawings, but I found the text fascinating as well -- learned a whole lot about Da Vinci's working habits, projects, set-backs, obsessions, and, of course, his genius. 

Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
I've already raved about this book here -- I am so glad I had a chance to read it before it becomes a major motion picture in 2013. 


Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Biss drew me with the first page of the first essay. These essays force the reader to think hard about racism in America, past and present. I posted a review of this book here a few month's ago. Can't recommend it highly enough. 

Joan Didion's Blue Nights
I've been a Didion devotee since 1979. Reading Didion is like visiting with someone I've known and loved since high school -- comforting, reassuring, right. This book is beyond page-turner; I read it with my eyes wide-open, forgetting to blink. "When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children." Indeed.

On My Wish List:


Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps.
I was slow to warm up to Boland's work, but in the last year or so I've become a huge fan. She gets to this place in her best poems where she's almost speaking in tongues, comprehensible, but in fractured bits of image and pure emotion. Example, from her poem "Pomegranates":

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.  
She will enter it.  As I have.
She will wake up.  She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.  I will say nothing.

Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve: How the World Became Modern
I read an excerpt of this book in The New Yorker last summer, and I was blown away. Lucretius for the masses -- what could be better? 

Tra la la la End of Year Poetry Book Recommendations

Lately I have been very much involved in the great American rush to string the cranberries and popcorn (it is not easy as it sounds), bake the chocolate cookies (they must be crispy and chewy), stir the egg nog into the whiskey (goes down smooth but requires immediate one-hour high-intensity workout to offset epic caloric consumption), and all order of holiday merriment, but I have also been busy compiling lists of my favorite poetry book and lit mag reads of 2011, plus reading those of others.

While I put the final touches on my extended list of the books/mags I most fervently and heartily endorse, please turn your gaze to the fine recommendations by past and present contributors at The Kenyon Review, including yours truly.

While you are at it, have a gander at Jeannine Hall Gailey's bow-perfect list of her 2011 picks.

It's also a good time to cherish and patronize your favorite local bookstores; in Seattle that would be ... Third Place Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, and Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

All this good reading, eating, imbibing, and supporting of local businesses makes me feel so warm and cozy! Won't you join me in spreading good cheer by spending your holiday money allocation supporting writers and buying their books locally? Artists at places like Etsy appreciate your money, too, as do places like the National Audubon Society (Seward Park here in Seattle has a wonderful store). I'm not quite ready to give my friends the gift of charitable donations, but purchasing items from environmental/do-gooder organizations, including Goodwill Industries, is a great way to help out others and keep the landfills a tad less choked.

Inspired by Linda Bierds

Flight

BY LINDA BIERDS

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—

back from bone the echoes stroke, back

from the halved heart, the lungs

three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.

From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs

dangle, as back they come, sounds

a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.

The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly

as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock

chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.

I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,

who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,

a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown

above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself

and half again some metamorphic click,

extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground,

he says, and back it comes, his glint

of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light

or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

Source: Poetry (September 2006).

This is Not Black Friday

I meant to post my poem "This is Not Black Friday" yesterday, or heck, Thursday night at 10 pm, but you know what? I have my own rituals around the day after Thanksgiving, and they have nothing to do with wearing the poet hat (not to mention the shopping hat). These include:

1. Staying in my pajamas & slippers till at least noon;

2. Having pumpkin/cream cheese pie for breakfast, turkey/stuffing leftovers for lunch, and eggplant parmesan for dinner;

3. Organizing my study, sorting through piles of clutter, etc. and [the best!]

4. Raking leaves.

This year I managed to attend to all four rituals. Because it was a cloudless, frosty morning, I donned my fur-lined sweatshirt over my PJs for an extra festive coziness.

I made my cup of decaf Tony's Carmelita extra strong and hot; it paired nicely with the pie.

Then I spent the morning transforming a small alcove in our sunroom/breakfast nook into my very own writer's studio. It's not much, but I have high hopes of purchasing one of those standing screens to create a psychological barrier between me and the kids crunching on their bowls of Panda Puffs. I also look forward to getting my books out of storage and putting a giant shelf to the right of me -- with all my favorites.

After a huge plate of turkey, stuffing, & cranberry, plus another schlive of pumpkin pie, I slid on my work gloves and headed to the backyard to tend to the millions of leaves that had blown into our yard during the 5-day wind/rainstorm. As I worked up a sweat I considered how a windstorm in the third week of November equals a record number of leaves in our tiny, mostly treeless yard. It reminded me of my years growing up on the east coast, where we had a mighty oak, a giant maple, and a substantial dogwood tree in our front yard--where raking, in other words, was serious business. Anyway, whatever the cause for all the leaves, it made for some great thinking/exercising time. As I toiled away I heard the not-far-enough-off sound of a leaf blower, it reminded me of Tacoma poet laureate William Kupinse's "A curse on leaf blowers and the men who love them,"and then it occurred to me that it's not so much the evil noise as the notion that someone would trade leaf-raking and its Zen-like calmness for a whining machine that can only raise one's stress levels. Replacing the rake with the leaf blower just doesn't make good sense for a nation in such bad physical and mental shape.

And what's up with the shopper-gone-mad pepper spraying? Or skipping the Thanksgiving meal to get a good place in line for the 10 pm Walmart opening? Excuse me for sounding off like a curmudgeon (RIP, Mickey Rooney), but I just don't get it.

This is Not Black Friday

This is lavender salt scrub Friday;
this is Buttermilk-Pancakes-in-the-Shapes-

of-Moons-and-Stars Friday. Nothing is black

on our 33-hundred block except the hunkered-

down beetles, the neighbor’s slick-black roof,

and our roof, too, its waterfall of rain.

Nothing’s been saved but the leftover lo mein.

The value of the day is not a 5MP camera

with 2.4” LCD, but the egg carton turkey centerpiece

with bottle cap and tinsel accents. Nothing rolled back

but the covers at 6 am, a child’s dada, you’re a wild thing,

the big deal made when she asked how the bubble gum

made it across the road (on the bottom of the chicken’s foot!).

It’s a frolic-in-a-field-of-dead-weeds Friday; no one

we know has slashed a god-damned thing.