Instead of patriotism, fungus

I’m not feeling the red-white-and-blue this year, so I hereby give you an image of the very pink Barbie pagoda mushroom–Podoserpula miranda–from New Caledonia, image drawn from The Global Fungal Red List. You’re welcome.

I found stories about its discovery when I was reminding myself of the names of mushroom morphologies for a novel I’ve been lightly revising. An interested agent told me to make the book weirder–a fun task that involved plenty of fungi. I finished this pass through the ms a couple of days ago, though, which dumped me back in the real world. The imminence of the Fourth of July somehow makes it all more awful: the big baneful bill stripping food assistance and health care from people who are barely getting by as the rich further enrich themselves. Unjust and violent deportations. Our funding of Netanyahu’s bombing and starvation of children. Obviously the list goes on. This country is harming the world and our own people in so many ways–as if the damage won’t rebound, as if all our fates aren’t connected. Not that there isn’t hope. I’m happy about Mamdani’s win. I appreciated the list in Rachel Barenblat’s blog post about where to send money to help mitigate the damage. But like so many, I’m frightened and overwhelmed, and I won’t be watching the fireworks.

One of my resources for calm is reading poems from the zillion books I purchased during the last several months at various festivals, conferences, and indie bookstores (I think supporting these efforts and authors is a good way to direct money, too). I’d never spent a lot of time with Marie Howe’s work, for instance, but her New and Selected, winner of the Pulitzer, is in fact a great pick for that prize. Sometimes I don’t enjoy the books that win the big accolades–which is okay, our tastes are allowed to differ–and in general I prefer individual collections over compendiums, but this one is worth a few days’ perusal. This review by Kevin O’Connor characterizes it well: “Howe offers poems both elegantly high-minded and unnervingly explicit and direct. Howe’s evolving style in her fifth collection reflects a willingness to question at each new beginning what poetry can be—to ask fundamental existential questions and to take seriously the essential mysteries.” I felt most moved by the poems from her 1997 book What the Living Do, but there are powerful poems throughout.

I’m also doing a mess of organizational work. I had been scheduled to read in Philadelphia in the Moonstone Arts/ Fergie’s Pub series on July 13th with other Tupelo poets, hotel and Amtrak all booked–then the event went virtual for good reasons but people forgot to tell me! A scramble ensued but I’m now joining the lineup on Weds July 9th at 7 pm. Bless Former Lesley for making the changeable kind of reservations.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to write a blog post about my relationship to criticism and critique, in my public work and personally (because those are intersecting domains for poets and maybe everybody else). It feels important as well as a subject I’d like to get feedback on from other writers negotiating similar complications. I keep stalling out because it’s too painful to expose–which tells you something, right?

This noncelebratory holiday weekend, feeling pink in the sense of raw and tender, I’m hoping to read more poetry and revise some of my own, even if I can’t write. If you can make one of my summer events for Mycocosmic, listed below, that would be gorgeous. In any case, I hope you’re finding poetry somewhere.