I found out last week that my manuscript “Everything is Always Wonderful if it is Almost Over” was a finalist with honorable mention for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book competition. I feel really happy about this! It’s just as good as winning and couldn’t have come at a better time. I have been feeling a little disconnected from (my) poetry so it’s lovely to have my manuscript be acknowledged. Onward it is.
I am happy to be reading next Wednesday, May 11 at 7.30pm at the Brooklyn Public Library for Brooklyn Arts Press. I will be reading with many of my BAP peers. It should be a good time. Here is the link to the Facebook event.
Also, last month I participated in a DIY Chapbook Challenge.
This is my little guy, titled 9-5. You can read it here if you are so inclined. It isn’t very long at all.
It’s been a weird week this week. Aside from the grey looming over NYC there is a general pervasive sense of doubt, wondering if anything that we do or plan to do is right. I have no answer for this, obviously. But this song soothes me, so I guess I’ll have to take what I can get.
LOL, but seriously.
Happy to have learned about Elinor Nauen and Koff Magazine from The Poetry Project Newsletter. Check it out here.
While it is still February, I should tell you that friend and poet J. Hope Stein put together a three volume issue of Poetry Crush in honor of Valentine’s Day. A poem of mine appears in Volume 3 but check out Volume 1 and Volume 2 also! Thanks Jen!
In other news, Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5 comes out in March. Even though the end of book four made me feel uncomfortable, I am still a devotee. How could I not be?
“That’s how I experience life, as an ocean of quotidian existence in which meaning is diffuse and difficult to grasp, and then comes death with its unprecedented concentration of meaning, or else love or birth.”
Burden of Proof
Rain makes events
When you travel
Situationally you are further
or are Occam’s Razor
The assumption that makes the most sense
at the time
Accounting for a variation of time
When what suits you changes
Avoidance a poor technique
For something to continue living
The consequences of decision
It isn’t me or you
It is an impatient personification
of the letters before us
Just a simple orange scarf
or passive aggressive emails
Gifts you have no memory of receiving
A song the man can’t help but sing
outside the train
Or French women who stand unknowingly
too close
The cliche spectacle
of the rain
I’m reading this Friday at the Issyra Gallery in Hoboken at 7pm with Russell Dillon and Matthew David Campbell. It’s always great to read Jersey side. Facebook link here. Come say hi.
Otherwise, here we are. 2016.
via rumblr.
Yes, I hold that male colonization of our imaginations—a calamity while ever we were unable to give shape to our difference—is, today, a strength. We know everything about the male symbol system; they, for the most part, know nothing about ours, above all about how it has been restructured by the blows the world has dealt us. What’s more, they are not even curious, indeed they recognize us only from within their system.
“Poetry aims for an economy of truth–loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcriptions of notions–beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
