Taking It Off, Again

Monday night, I want to see you--yes, you--here:

Burlesque Poetry Hour

Please join Gilda and special guest host Delilah (that's me) in enticing Remica L. Bingham, Piotr Gwiazda and Dean Smith to take it off on Monday, September 24th. Reading will begin at 8:00 p.m. in The Dark Room at Bar Rouge (1315 16th Street NW, DC).

I know all the poets and they are great writers and polished readers. There will be hijinks. If you ask nicely, I might cut your hair.

Now...let the excitement begin. I just got my AWP Panel details:

Breaking Lines on the Battlefield: Poetry of Wartime
with Doug Anderson, Kevin Bowen, Brian Turner, and Susan Tichy
Saturday, February 2, 2008
1:30-2:45PM

...this is great. People might even be awake by 1:30! Back from lunch! Less hungover! As a first-time moderator I was sure that I'd have a 9 AM Thursday slot, and need to dangle juice and donuts to lure in an audience. Plus, this means I'll have a chance to do advance promoting and talk with the panelists. Big Apple, here I come!

Well, not yet. This weekend, I'll be at horse races in southern Virginia...you know you're a Southern girl when your cousins invite you to their farm to watch the races. I'm hoping for mint juleps.

On a Slightly Less Navel-Gazing Note

"The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost


...As reproduced in Legos by Bill Ward and Holly Ward. For more vignettes straight out of poems by Frost and A.E. Housman, go here.

Book-age

A year ago I was in upstate New York at the Millay Colony. I would wake around 10 or 11 (I worked until 3 or 4 AM). During the day I would drive into Chatham or Hudson and walk around, look at antique shops and art galleries, have a beer and snap photographs of colorful window-shutters. By 6 I'd be back at the big house, sharing a huge salad with the other fellows, chatting about the one copy of the Sunday New York Times that we all shared. Every night I was drafting a poem, and whittling away at a longer, older manuscrpt (The Reveal) that would become Theories of Falling. My studio wall fluttered with pushpinned poems, which I moved around to create different orders and sections, alternating with photographs xeroxed from a Diane Arbus book I'd found in the Millay library.

There was a nervous energy to the month: this will matter. I found one local artist whose surreal photocollages I loved, and struck up a conversation with the gallery owner. When she asked what I was looking for I said "oh, I need cover art for my book," and though it was an *utter* bluff at that moment, it all seemed possible: there would be a book. It would need a cover.

At the end of the month, I came home and immediately sent the MS off to 2 places where I'd been a finalist before--the May Swenson Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize, and Sarabande's open reading. A month passed. I found sloppy lines drafted in September's 2 AM haste. Sarabande rejected me based on the new poems. I reread older pages that I'd cut, and some were like workhorses: hefty, well-crafted, good magazine credits. I felt guilty for cutting them. I returned to my old title. All that nervous energy...faded. And right up until April of this year I was sending out a balanced, polished manuscript. But it was the MS I'd sent out early last October, with all of its newborn flaws and urgency, that would count.

Now, in the aftermath of April and August, it's another September. I'm on page 45 of another manuscript--drafting and scrapping and cutting and shuffling. There's no goldenrod here in DC, and no butterflies drifting over Edna's tennis court. These poems are strange and incantatory, populated by minotaurs and battlefields and orchids and hippogriffs. They are not personal, though they are human-hearted. But perhaps this work will matter. I hope this will matter.