in remembrance

*

I write because I would like to live forever.

Reginald Shepherd, 1963-2008

*

My cousin, Mark, died last week at the age of 47. His age alone would make this loss tragic, but what made it profound was that he had a good spirit that reached farther than his body, trapped within cerebral palsy, ever could. Now the world loses this 45-year-old poet, whose words reach farther than his too-few years. Both will be missed by many.

(To read a poem, "You, Therefore," by Reginald Shepherd, go here. To go to his blog, click on the photograph.)

*

Buon Compleanno Andrew!

happy happy belated new year

**

joan miro, circus horse

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**

what in 2008 I'm looking forward to:

* the Democrats winning the Presidency

* the Democrats keeping control of the Congress

* with a Democratic Congress & Administration, good programs like universal health care being created, the Kyoto treaty being signed by the U.S., progress being made in an end to global poverty initiatives, combat troops coming home from Iraq, carbon emissions being capped and maybe, just maybe a carbon tax, an end to the counter-productive No Child Left Behind, repeals of the tax-cuts for the richest Americans, maybe even a balanced budget again, investment in solar, wind, and other clean & renewable energy sources and the jobs that will create, not being embarrassed and ashamed daily by our President.

* working on the Presidential campaign

* hammering lots of nails in New Orleans

* healthy, un-injured Pittsburgh Steelers' starters

* new issues of Siren

* the ocean

* spring and fall, swimming, cherry slurpees, roller coasters, Europe, bees knees, vineyards

* learning about photography, relearning some Russian, learning a little bit of Italian, learning to bake vegan cookies, learning to keep my big mouth shut when it should be, learning to play a new song on the piano, learning lots of new things

* publication of my new chapbook

* maybe, just maybe finishing my full-length manuscript (and oh, pretty please with sugar on top, finding a publisher??)

* new books by my dear comrades-in-poetry

* MFA!

* filling in the following things to look forward to: ________, and _______, and maybe even ________.

* poetry, poetry, poetry

**

that for which i'm thankful, a-z

Photo above by Bobby Diba

A: Art. Anyone who can find me a copy of Sinead O'Connor's original version of "This is a Rebel Song."

B: Baryshnikov. That my Blog is working again. Babies of all sorts of species.

C: Children. The movie Crash. Cherry Slurpees. Charlie Rose. Cleaning products.

D: Dance. Daisies.

E: Elephants (the real kind, not the "GOP" kind) . The next Editor who accepts some of my work. Evolution.

F: Frost.

G: Louise Glück's chapbook-length poem, October. Gorillas.

H: Honeysuckle. Half Nelson.

I: Irony. Ice. Especially the polar-ice-cap kind.

J: Jezebel, one of my cats.

K: Kevin, Claire, and Caroline, as sweet as they are adorable, as redemptive as they are sweet.

L: Lucille Clifton's work.

M: Matt Hart, Tim Keane, and Mark Cunningham, who kept me company during the past few weeks while I put together Siren's new issue (which will be out any minute now). Metaphor.

N: Neko Case's Blacklisted. "No."

O: Oceans.


P: Photography. 'Like the heartbreaking, beautiful photo at the top of this post, by Bobby Diba. Postal mail. Perri. Poetry, poetry, poetry, poetry. My sweetsouled Po-blog-com, especially Michi, Nic, and Jehanne. My Pittsburgh Steelers.

Q: Queen Riley.

R: Rubyfruit Lulu (one of my two cats). Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

S: Stephanie, who shares life boats with me. Stephanie who waited tables with me, went to college with me, went from Pennsylvania to Montana, and all the states in between, with me, and all the way back with me, and somewhere in the Dakotas taught me how to pee outside. Stephanie, who, after I moved and moved again and we lost touch with each other, googled me and emailed me, life boat in tact. Sinead O'Connor's She who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.


T: Trees. This Clumsy Living, by Bob Hicok.

V: Van Morrison.

W: Warmth. Wilco.

X: xoxo

Y: "Yes."

Z: Zevon, not here long enough, but here more than most.

**

TO BE CONTINUED

love. sometimes.

1. Honeysuckle is my favorite scent.

2. Last night I watched one of my favorite films, Double Indemnity, and something Fred McMurray's character said, that I don't even remember from the dozens of other times I've watched it over more than a dozen years, jumped out at me. That's one of the things that really takes my breath away about great poems, music, films, and any kind of art: every time you experience it, there's always something new about the experience, something you learn or see or feel that you hadn't before. I hadn't seen the film in quite a while, so there was a lot of that, but what really just stood out and up and jumped up and out and bit at an important artery:

How could I have ever known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

**

meme: eight things you don't know about me

Like I told Nic, I thought I had made it to home base without being tagged in this particular game of the poetry blogosphere, but, you know, you can run but you just can't hide when you are a cog in the industrial complex of blogging poets. Anyway, this is an alright meme, and being tagged "it" is half the fun, so here are eight things you don't know about me. (Nicole's is hilarious, though, so hers is a tough post to follow.)

1.) I am a statistics geek. In college I was down right competitive about being chosen to be the statistics teaching assistant (not realizing this was not a job that EV-ER-EE-ONE coveted), like some stereotypical, prototypical, made-for-the-movies bratty high-school girl vying for the title of homecoming queen. And I still loooove quantitative data, research methods, correlation, regression, ANOVAs, academic journals like Personality and Social Psychology, ranting to the television when anyone on a news (or a so-called-news) program makes some assumption based on anectodal evidence or some assertion based on incorrect interpretation of stats, etc., etc., etc. Yes, it's true, I have even been known to run statistical analyses on various data I've collected -- to, um, yeah, try to maximize the output of my submission efforts: charts and charts of magazines' %acceptance rates, response times, circulation or webhits, rated prestige, and on and on and on, and then interpreted statistically. One might say obsessive, I say scientific, practical, okay, obsessive.

2.) I once had a crush on Subcomandante Marcos.

3.) I've never been stung by a bee.

4.) I am terrified of frogs and toads. I have recurring nightmares about being in the dark and not being able to see, and not being able to move or step anywhere because all I hear is ribbit ribbit ribbit ribbit, ribbits into infinity.

5.) One of my favorite and overused words is anthropomorphize. And this is a two-for-one something-you-don't-know-about-me: I anthropomorphize so much that I never leave a single ice cube alone in the tray, because I think oh, it must be so cold and scared in there all alone like that in the dark.

6.) When I was about seven or eight, I started to sell my Halloween candy and give the money to charity. My interest in politics began when I realized my efforts did not seem to end poverty or eradicate racism. Seriously.

7.) By eight or nine I branched out beyond the Halloween candy and incorporated all of my businesses into "Fancy Freddie's, Inc." Before that, there were all the independent companies: the weekly Daily News, published by Fancy Freddie Press, Fancy Freddie's restaurant, Fancy Freddie's radio (WFFR), which was broadcast into a tape recorder with me as the dj (using all of my older siblings' albums until liner notes started to go missing or vinyl records started to show scratches), and Fancy Freddie's Pizza (Ritz crackers, ketchup, and parmesan cheese).

8.) I founded the now-defunct, two-person, secret (hush hush) organization called GVEC. If anyone can guess what that means I'll start it up again. (Hint: G stands for Group for the) But ssshhh, don't tell the FBI or NSA. grin

Now if you're in the mood for an intelligent and actually-important blog-post, read "Why Poetry?" on Amy King's blog -- even if you're not a poet, or even that interested in poetry (how could you not be?! -- but, anyway --) this collection of a few brilliant essays on language and its powerful relationship with culture and politics will most likely entertain and inform you a lot more than anything that has been on my blog, or many others, in quite a while.

My Fair City

My hometown... where sites like this are not uncommon. Unfortunately I didn't have the right kind of camera or film to get everything into this photo. Oh, yes, there was more. (And notice the brick -- even it is black and gold.)

Football season officially started last week, with the Steelers winning, of course, 28-14. However, this house was fully decked out before the pre-season even started. Such is life in the beautiful, exciting, boring, ethnic, aging, always renewing, former milltown, still-culturally-milltown, of the Rust Belt, and it is amusing, entertaining, and a sociological, cultural-anthropological gem. And no researcher or observer could even start to understand it without taking a really thorough look at its most rabid and most unifying and perhaps most central phenomenon: the city's relationship with its beloved Steelers.

'Strange post for a poetry site? Well, yes, but this poet grew up in Pittsburgh. And contradictory or odd as it might seem, along with my heroes such as Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mikhael Baryshnikov, James Madison, Martha Graham, Erik Erickson, Frederick Douglass, Clarence Darrow, Frida Kahlo, and Subcommidante Marcos, are names like Mean Joe Greene, Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, Franco Harris, Heinz Ward, and Troy Palamalu. Go Steelers, and cliche as it is, you're poetry in motion.

Random at 7:40 in the morning

Of all the arts, I think the literacy rate in the U.S. is lowest for poetry. So such are the consequences:

• 'Went to a Barnes&Noble this past Saturday and in about 2 hours in the poetry section, another poet friend and I were pleasantly shocked that before we left the section, 1 more person did come over to the smallest section in the store and peruse.
• I've been keeping track of visitors to the poetry sections of national-chain-bookstores that I go to for about a year, and in approximately seventy visits (lasting an average of about an hour each) in probably about ten different store locations of Barnes and Border's, in six different cities, I have seen three other people, besides 2 that were with me on a few occasions, stop by the poetry sections.
• Oh, wait, the consequences are way too vast and layered and thick to even unravel all of them, yet alone list them here, especially when I didn't get enough sleep. Anyway, it can be depressing. *

*A great cure for such disillusioning thoughts: As Laurel said on her wonderful blog in an August post, having other poets out there (like all you sweet life-jacket-like blogging poets) with which to comiserate -- and celebrate -- is like having your own "fireflies in the dark."

*Another great cure for the less-than-lovely feelings and thoughts that accompany such things: Having one of those fireflies to hold you at night, while you're watching Gray's Anatomy, while you're reading Pinsky or Flynn or Olds, while you're drinking 1/2 cherry - 1/2 Coke Slurpees, while you're reading through submissions to the literary journal you edit, and while you drink cuba libres and walk in the rain and forget about poetry for a while. I know a firefly who is really great at this, but I think I'll try to keep the identity of this very-talented-thing-with-wings to myself, lest someone else try to solicit his light. (*grin*) But I highly recommend such firefly intimacy for our endangered species.

Random at 8:15 am: Highway-toll-booth-toll collectors and poets are the kindest people on earth.

Random at 8:19 am: Ever Saskya is a great new poet who just published her first book. It is quite different than anything else you're likely to have seen, and it's wonderful.

Random at 8:39 after feeding my cats: The Best American Poetry 2006, guest-edited by Billy Collins, should be arriving on those lonely bookstore bookshelves very soon this month. 'Always something to look forward to, I think, and especially this year, I am soooo excited to see the selections given the guest editor's uncommonly accessible poetry yet somewhat illusive-to-the-pigeonholes-or-presumptions-nature. Hmmm..... 'can't wait....

Random at 841 am: I miss you Brad, one of my very first "fans." Stay warm up there and have fun standing out among all the Scandinavians. And, oh, stay away from Fargo.

Especially random at 8:45: And I miss you, innocent Owney.