I don’t know why it’s so much fun to give presents to strangers, but I enjoy this annual Big Poetry Giveaway project so much. Thanks again to Kelli Russell Agodon for organizing it for National Poetry Month 2014. Twenty-seven people entered (that’s my lucky number) and I just selected a winner via an online random number generator. Congratulations to Michael Allyn Wells! There will be a bonus in addition to the two books promised. Ecotone editor Anna Lena Phillips just gave me a little pile of her beautiful and useful letterpress chapbook, “A Pocket Book of Forms,” so Michael, you’re getting one too. I don’t even remember saying anything helpful about this project in draft stage, but Anna Lena swears I did. Proof that little gifts do come back to you, multiplied.
This poetry week had ups and downs, but I’m ending it in the black. I started in pain from a wrenched back and shoulder and worried I wouldn’t be able to get through the mucky piles of labor ahead. Nightmares about trying and failing to keep my kids safe have been costing me sleep, too. I think it’s just mixed feelings about how fast they’re growing, but I slapped poor Chris awake at 6 a.m. today, thinking I was fending off bad magic directed at my daughter. I was also sad about the end of the Writers at Studio Eleven series and uncertain whether my spring term Poetic Forms workshop was clicking. In the last few days, though, people have been volunteering that they love the course, and more importantly, among the new poems they’re showing me are a few real dazzlers. I also received an email from a student who read at Studio Eleven a few weeks ago and now wants to start a slam poetry club on campus–hurrah! I also found myself participating in a teacherly energy-sharing circuit. Yesterday’s Skype visit to Stan Galloway‘s poetry course at Bridgewater College was really fun. I loved his students’ take-no-prisoners challenges: for instance, why there are so many ghosts in my poems when I describe myself as a skeptic? (Um…) Anna Lena gave a brilliant demonstration of literary editing to my class, using a triolet as an example, and then a beautiful reading later in the evening.
And then I received a note from Switchback, whose editors accepted my poem “Epistolary Art” recently. The poem’s now up AND it has been honored with the editor’s prize for the issue. I first drafted this piece while listening to a talk about Keats in New Zealand. The poem felt important to me–it’s about making connections over distance through letters and ultimately through poems, which is a central idea in my current ms Radioland. I had a particularly hard time getting it right, though, eventually subtracting a good-sized chunk of it, so it’s particularly satisfying to know this epistle reached someone.
So here’s to Michael, and to the month of May, and to poems in the pipeline–I even received an acceptance from Crazyhorse last week, a journal I’ve admired for ages. I’m going to give away the metaphorical farm–whatever that is–if subtractions keep adding up this way.
LESLEY WHEELER 