January

Some people like to escape January in Minnesota. I'll admit it sounds attractive, in the midst of the third-snowiest winter on record. But there is a quiet in January that draws me, even as I wait for the birds' pineal glands to tell them the sun is coming back. Something about a persistent light snowfall, carrying on from one day to the next, erasing what it can.

New Book Coming in 2012

My manuscript "Meridian" won the 2010 Snowbound Poetry Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press, judged by Patricia Fargnoli. The book will be published some time in 2012. I haven't heard a firm date, yet. (At the pace that poetry gets published, I often wonder if many poets can only hope to be published posthumously.)

It's wonderful to have a book coming. There is a sense of anticipation, as if the creative work is not quite completed, because the book design, the words on the cover, the image all need to be put in place for the finished product to become a book. The hard part--the writing--is done, though, and what comes next is just for pleasure. I used to think that publishing a book was going to change my life in some large way, but now I am happy with the quiet, subtle change that occurs when one's creative effort enters into the world. Someone will read it, and that is such a lovely thing.

Save a Forest

Looking at the 3-foot stack of old magazines over there in the corner, I think we should stop printing literary journals and move everything over to the Internet. More and and more, I'm liking what I see in the on-line journals. The quality is there in many of them. And the biggies like Poetry and Kenyon Review and Agni, etc., can continue to provide the kind of quality they've been offering in an on-line mode. They can continue their advertising on-line as well. And the poems will be more accessible, reaching more readers and staying in print a lot longer. Thereby making the journals' survival a lot more feasible, and saving one heck of a lot of trees.

Amazing Karesansui Poems

I am reading a slim volume of poems by the superb West Coast poet Carol Snow titled Placed: Karesansui Poems. It's taking me a long time to read because there are so few words. The title of each poem is a single preposition, and the view from each is into the karesansui garden, a small landscape garden designed to be viewed from a number of fixed vantage points.

The entire book is composed of a series of 70 poems, each titled with a preposition followed by a small collection of phrases separated by dashes, many of them in quotation marks, with meticulous documentation of their sources. This is, in fact, probably the most meticulous book of poems I have ever read!

And I am slow because the poems demand that. What are prepositions but linking words? They are entirely about relationships--temporal, spacial, logical. So the poems are meditations on relationship. Here is "Across," in its entirety:

Across

each of its stones its own--on the scale of-- : from
me--
a distance: an ocean

Some of the references are clear, others are pebbles dropped into the well, and it takes a long time for them to reach bottom. That's why this reading is so slow.

There is more silence in these poems than in any I have read since Dickinson. There is also more action, and hardly any-thing. An extraordinary collection.

Equinox Just Ahead

It is almost

summer. That time that sweeps
past. Day. Its train of greens
leaves us bowing

and bow-wowing. Dogs panting in the heat
and lacking any respect
from humanity. To be “shot down in the street

like a dog.” Dogshot in the street. Down
dog. Almost summer. That heat. Sequins
and green equinox. When

the center of the sun
lines up with the equator. We look
for lines and intersects. In an angle-

less universe, equinoctial points
matter. The celestial equator and the ecliptic intersect.
That makes us happy, dogs that we are.

Orioles

In May, right about this time, when the maple leaves are goldish green and standing up on their stems, about the size of a fifty-cent piece (dates me, doesn't it?), the orioles return. And sure enough, yesterday they came, looking for nectar and singing their tune ("With a song in my heart"). Amazing creatures, that I never tire of watching and hearing. Spring. A good reason for living.