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Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah
Performances ahead: Now filing out of the auditorium for a while: AWP and Shenandoah. A friend of mine, describing a thorny family situation amid the hubbub of AWP’s Book Fair, tried to say, “I shouldn’t use scare quotes.” The phrase came out “square coats.” Square old me, standing there in my favorite velvet blazer–I hadn’t…
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Winter bongos
Yesterday I drafted this blog from inside a very cold bongo drum. High winds rippled and banged our metal roof riotously: “Thumbing / the tin roof like a smoker who / cannot get the house to stay alight,” I wrote in Mycocosmic, in a poem about perimenopausal sleeplessness. Even though hot flashes are rare now,…
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The knife
At one of the many events I attended this fall, a magazine editor, reflecting on downsides of a generally rewarding job, sighed and said something like “so many bad poems.” What’s hardest for me about selecting poems for Shenandoah is how many good poems I receive, way more than I can accept, given a limited…
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Cosmic, dystopic, poetic
Spring proceeds peony by heavy-headed peony. With satisfaction and struggle, I’ve mostly finished the editorial part of the season, although we’re now proofing Shenandoah‘s Spring issue. I’ll be off the hook for a while, except for the relatively moderate workload of running the annual Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers, because I’ve now set the poetry…
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Mycelial poetry devouring the ruins
For the last couple of years, my muse has been mycelial. I mean both that fungus infests my current mss–I’m revising a poetry collection and a novel–and, in a related way, that a mycelial life seems like what I ought to be aiming for. Spreading tendrils underground, sprouting mushrooms after a storm, metabolizing trouble: these…
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Differently to #AWP22
It’s been a packed week, but also kind of a splendid one. I feel more connected to literary people again–and more conscious of how much the first pandemic year, especially, disconnected us. I returned from a good conference last Sunday to visit with the wonderful poet January Gill O’Neil, who talked to my class the…
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Three editors on rejection and persistence
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Writing and publishing poetry book reviews
I’m gearing up for a virtual weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, where I’ll give a Friday night reading as well as speaking on a panel about “The Weirder Side of the Fantastic,” both organized by the indefatigable, resourceful, generous writer Anya Martin. I’ll post about that next week, barring apocalypse, but in the meantime…
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Screening Shenandoah submissions
It’s the last week of classes! I’m participating in what will be a brilliant reading at 4:30 today (in Hillel on W&L’s campus), from the beautiful Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia! And can I say it again?–this intense term is nearly DONE! In corners of time, I’m also screening poems for Shenandoah, both for…