Just a quick reminder that my reading / book blog has moved to outsideofacat.wordpress.com -- Drop by and have a look! The paint has dried, that smell of wallpaper paste has gone, and everything is shiny and new. You'll find lots of new posts about Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Rainer Maria Rilke, and a bunch of other cool folks.

The Strangeness of Athens, GA

...this past weekend, E, L and myself made our way to Athens, GA for the "Strangeness in Context" conference. It was a fun trip, and I really enjoyed the presentations.

Athens is a lovely place, with fun affordable eating places (The Grit, for example) and great mint mocha (Jittery Joe's).

Yes, "America's Best Inn" turned out to be pretty much the opposite, and it was an 8 hour drive each way, and it did rain while we were there, but I still really enjoyed the trip and spending time around other strange / creative people like myself. :) I did miss one talk that I wanted to hear, about Virginia Woolf's Orlando, because it was at the same time as my own presentation, but what I did hear was interesting and thought-provoking.

As for other news, keep an eye out for poems of mine in the inaugural issues of Lumn and China Grove. I'll post links once the issues are live. The next issue of The Nassau Review will also include one of my poems.
USM's Center for Writers has generously given me the Ben Mounger Rawls award, and I am both very happy and honoured.
Oh, and I just proofread the poems for the upcoming issue of Memorious -- there will be some great stuff in this issue!

magnolias with their eyes wide open

take a look this new york times photo gallery / article about mississippi -

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/07/27/magazine/mississippi-health-care.html?ref=magazine#

this, too, is america. i wish more people were aware of the situation here - minds need to be blown. and changes need to be made.

if you want to know even more about what folks here are struggling with, try to get your hands on a documentary titled "lalee's kin" - about a school in mississippi.

new US poet laureate

natasha tretheway was just named as the new us poet laureate - congratulations! this is especially exciting seeing that she's from gulfport, mississippi, which is literally an hour from here. she's number 19 - and just so you can impress your friends with random trivia, here are the other 18, courtesy of wikipedia:

1986–1987: Robert Penn Warren 

1987–1988: Richard Wilbur 

1988–1990: Howard Nemerov 

1990–1991: Mark Strand 

1991–1992: Joseph Brodsky 

1992–1993: Mona Van Duyn 

1993–1995: Rita Dove 

1995–1997: Robert Hass 

1997–2000: Robert Pinsky 

2000–2001: Stanley Kunitz 

2001–2003: Billy Collins 

2003–2004: Louise Glück 

2004–2006: Ted Kooser 

2006–2007: Donald Hall 

2007–2008: Charles Simic 

2008–2010: Kay Ryan 

2010–2011: W.S. Merwin 

2011–2012: Philip Levine

new poems

so it looks like i survived the usual end-of-semester madness fairly well. :) all my grading is done, all assignments and papers are handed in, and summer is upon me.

there are two new poems of mine you can now read online:

(click to go to product homepage)

http://www.usm.edu/product/page29/page36/page36.html

product is a journal put out by the center for writers at usm, and while i was one of the poetry editors for this issue, let me assure you that all entries were democratically selected by independent readers. :D

working on product was fun, especially reading all the submissions from usm's students, graduate and undergrad. i hope you enjoy what we selected!

chapbook! yay!

friends and frenemies,

the time has come, my chapbook - the five parts of love: confabulating sappho - is now available from dancing girl press! so head right over to their site and take a look, and check out some of the other chaps they have in stock.

http://dulcetshop.ecrater.com/p/14676929/the-five-parts-of-love-confabulating#

here is one sample poem from the collection, just to whet your appetite. the words in italics are surviving fragments of sappho's poetry, namely fragment number 7, taken from the translation by anne carson (if not, winter).

i'm excited this has finally taken physical shape, and what better time for it than poetry month! i hope you'll enjoy my adventures with sappho, - please comment / let me know either way!

p.s. - in case you couldn't tell: http://youtu.be/zrCuZd9hed0  *wink

for more ekphrasis / all the pretty pictures

the bridesmaid, by millais

when i got an email at the end of march inviting me to join our center for writers' poetry marathon, i decided to give it a go. the idea was (is) to write one poem every day in april (poetry month) and share it with the rest of the marathon writers before midnight that day. miss a day and you're out. i didn't think i'd last long, but today is the 16th and i have not missed a day yet! which means, yes, i have 16 new poems and will have a couple more before the end of the month. granted, some of them are not very good, but practice makes perfect better. :)

a few weeks ago, my poetry professor mentioned there ought to be more ekphrastic poetry, and when i was stuck for a topic / trigger for a poem about a week ago, i remembered and went to googleartproject and took a good, long, close look at my favorite painting, millais' bridesmaid. and wrote a poem about it.

my poem for today is also ekphrastic, - i explored some of the many collections google art project contains and found another painting that tickled me. it's this:

the girl i left behind me, by eastman johnson

i didn't read up on the painting, the historical context or the artist, because as i was looking at this scene, i had an immediate response. click on the picture for a larger view.

in any case, the point of this post is that maybe there really SHOULD be more ekphrastic poetry, so why not give it a shot! any poem that describes or enters into a painting can be considered ekphrastic. if a picture captures you or draws you in, that's all you need. well, that and the willingness to sit down and write it out.

google art project is a nice starting point - you can browse through so many works of art, modern and ancient, things you know and things you didn't know existed, from museums all over the world. what i particularly like is that you can zoom in on the images. with some of the paintings that means you get as close a look as you would if you almost touched your nose to the canvas (which does not exactly elicit a lot of enthusiasm from the people who work at the museum, take my word for it.) so, my suggestion is, look and write.