New Issue of Blackbird!

Announcing Blackbird v10 n1 | Spring 2011

Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts published by Virginia Commonweath University, announces its new Spring 2011 issue featuring:

-A new translation and the original versions of Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s 1996 book Sorrow Gondola, with an introductory essay by David Wojahn, a letter to Tranströmer by Jean Valentine, audio readings of three of the poems in Swedish, and video of Franz Liszt’s “Lugubre Gondola No. 2” that inspired the poem by the same title

-Audio of Victor Lodato, winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Kathleen Graber, Jean Valentine, Kate Greenstreet, Jake Adam York,
Mathias Svalina, and Allison Titus

--I praised Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth and Allison Titus's Sum of Every Lost Ship in a previous issue of Blackbird; they're great evidence of the important poetry being published these days by Cleveland State University's Poetry Center--

-Poetry by Norman Dubie, Dave Smith, Jennifer Chang, Victoria Chang, Yu Shibuya,
Brittany Cavallaro, Jenny Johnson, Eve Jones, and more

--What a rockstar line-up!...watch in particular out for up & comers Brittany Cavallaro (whose poem I read for Linebreak) and Jenny Johnson (a friend from UVA days who has been studying with the fabulous Gabrielle Calvocoressi)--

-Fiction by Kelly Cherry, Steve Yarbrough, Victor Lodato, Adrian Dorris, Julie Hensley,
Darrin Doyle, Aurelie Sheehan, and Chris Leo

-Reviews of Joshua Poteat, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Keith Montesano,
and Sandra Beasley*

-In gallery, plays by Victor Lodato and Yasmine Rana, an audio essay by Jeff Porter, a video essay by Nick Twemlow and Robyn Schiff, and the U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration’s 1951 “Duck and Cover”

*Me! This turns out to be a lovely review of I Was the Jukebox by Laura Van Prooyen, in which she says "Reading I Was the Jukebox cover to cover can hypnotize you."

Read the whole issue online by visiting http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu

Very Special Delivery

So, after an 18-hour drive that took me straight from Mississippi to DC, followed by a belated Father's Day dinner with my folks (Ardeo's scallops and octopus over black lentils), followed by a knock-out Rob Roy perfectly mixed by the owner of the Black Fox in Dupont Circle (oh, I have missed my town!), I was sleeping in this morning. 

A knock on the door at 9:10 AM woke me up. Who was it? Why? Would I have to put clothes on? I walked to my door and peered into the hallway. Nobody there. Whew.

Then I noticed the package someone had left behind. 

My heart skipped a little. I grabbed the scissors and carefully sliced open one end.

My first thought was: Yay! Yay! Yay! (Eloquent, right? That's why they call me a poet.) My second thought was: Funny, I had never thought about my book's physical color...

...and that color turns out to be a lovely robin's-egg blue, with a goldenrod spine. 

No other way to say it: Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is here. Oh, sure, you won't see it in a store near you until July 12. But in this moment, a book has been born.

Even though I've reviewed how it would look a hundred times--from text to cover art to even, yes, my own flap copy--I had never imagined this moment. 

Stand up, baby. Shake your tail feathers. Let's dance. 

(Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is available for pre-order now from Barnes & Noble and NOOK, Amazon.com and Kindle, iTunes/iBook, IndieBound, Borders, Powell’s, Politics & Prose, Teaching for Change, and Square Books. Or you can come to my place in DC and try to steal one of these five copies. But be warned: I'll fight you.)

Portrait of the Artist as a Sixth Grader

One of the nice things about having stayed in the same area I grew up in (compounded by the power of Facebook) is that I've stayed in touch with old, old friends. Such as my friend Tricia, whose parents live across the street from my grandmother. Every time I went to see her in McLean, Virginia, I hoped I would get the chance to go to the Kuzmack's house and play with Tricia and her sister Steffie in a backyard that had a great big vegetable garden and a playhouse with hippie love beads hanging down in a curtain across its doorway. 

Tricia emailed me the other week to report that her parents, in cleaning out the attic, had run across some old things from Haycock elementary school. Among the papers that had been packed away? "Literature Delight, Volume #6." Our Paris Review. Within the day she'd sent photographs. A rather snazzy-looking compilation, I must say. Check out the brilliant blue of that cover! Check out the apple-dotted i's! I remember lunchtimes in the school library with books ready to be bound--punching the paper holes, lining up the slots, pulling the lever to clamp on the black plastic binding. Breathing in the hot plastic smell of the nearby laminating machine. 

And then...there were the poems. 

"The Storyteller" has to be a nod to L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl, which is about a group of cousins growing up on Prince Edward Island. "Cecily" is an odd name for me to use--whereas I had Jessicas and Adams in my classes, I can't recall a single Cecily. But one of the children in Montgomery's book is named Cecily King. In Montgomery's book, the "Story Girl" Sarah Stanley is the same age as the other children. But I remember always thinking that she seemed preternaturally old in spirit, destined to stay alone with her stories while the others went on to marrying, having children, and moving away. So in the world of my poem, I projected a future of telling stories to the children of friends who were playmates. Oh my. Twenty years ago, and I was already drawn to this notion of a woman choosing to be "the storyteller" even if it set her apart from the pleasures of a normal life.   

Then there is this poem, which won the school's creative writing contest that year. (I also took third place...and I placed in the nonfiction category too, with a humor essay about having a little sister in the house. I was overzealous.)

OK, I was a somewhat melancholy kid. But I will own these poems, if only because in seeing them again after all these years I still have such fresh, sharp memories of their conception. In sixth grade, just as now, I was a girl with brown hair and brown eyes. I remember that being the first year I felt envy of the girls with exotic coloring--and the opening lines of "The New Me" gave me a chance to imagine that doppelganger, prettier Sandra. I'm not sure what it was that I thought would embittered and harden me down the road, but I do know that I was interested in the iterations of language: seeing how much I could advance the story with just tiny changes to the phrasing. And I knew I could get away with dropping down that last standalone line if, rhythmically, it completed the line before it. 


Thanks, Tricia, for this trip down memory lane. I suppose posting juvenilia for the world to see could be a bad idea. But often, when I answer the question of "how long have you been writing poetry?" with "since elementary school," I see a flicker of disbelief in people's eyes. Here you have it, folks. Proof!