"The Unobstructed Silence of the Advocado Dawn"

I'm going slightly crazy with planning events and promoting events and structuring and taking care of events at my job, where I coordinate the things going on in a children's department in an independent bookstore.  Yesterday I got to meet director, writer, and producer Chris Columbus--he directed Home Alone, and wrote Gremlins, as well as directing the first two Harry Potter movies.  He was at our bookstore promoting his new book House of Secrets.  We were lucky enough to have a big crowd, mostly due to the fact that he has a lot of family in the Chicago area.

So I've been crazy busy, and expect to stay that way until mid-May at least.  Tonight I reached into my book bag that I carry everywhere with me, and found Lisa Jarnot's new book of selected poems, Joie de Vivre.  I'd forgotten that some kind book rep had sent it to me, and that I'd put it in the bag.  It's from City Lights books, so it's one of those handsome little volumes like Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems or Allen Ginsberg's Howl.  And man oh man I love Jarnot's work.  I love the sound of it, the beauty of the sound, the flow on the page, absurdity into beauty and back to absurd again. She makes me want to dare more, veer more, and sing better in my own work.  Here's a section of Sea Lyrics:

I am here inside the freezer where you left me, I am the unobstructed silence of the avocado dawn, I am the neighborhood of foreign things, I am the telemarketer of evening, I have only donuts and the doors are locked, I am as thick as the morning down on Broadway, I am walking near the freeway as it shakes, I am the overpass and shattered in the midst of day, I am the last of the partially submerged vehicles on the waterfront on Sunday buying jam.

See?  If you need a prompt, just write "I am..." and begin.  Make it new, make it wander, make it leap across a stage, make it sing.

In other news, I am reading at The Book Cellar this Thursday with friends and fellow poets Jen Besemer and Richard Fox. I think I am going to read almost all new works from my book-in-progress of letter poems.

Flurries, But Still

So, here's a few things I want you to be aware of during this, our National Poetry Month:

1. It's snowing here in Chicago today. Flurries, but still.  For a poetry prompt, write a haiku about snow in April. It might include such phrases as "I shake my fist at the sky," but really, just do your own thing.

2. If you buy a poetry book online this month from some select and wonderful publishers of poetry, those presses will send another copy of your purchased book to a friend.  For free.  As in zero dollars and zero cents.  The suggestion is to send poetry to someone who does not normally read poetry.  It's like the Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on their door, but slightly less invasive.

3. There's a project going on this month, where various poets take Pulitzer Prize-winning novels and use those texts and via erasure and other collage techniques, make poems.  This would be a great journal exercise or writing practice for, well, for me, but probably for a lot of other people, too. Here's one of my faves, from Germany-based poet Sarah Sloat.

4. I am still plugging away at my project to write 69 letter poems.  Here's a draft of one:

Dear Family Chronicle of a Flock of Pigeons,

There are so many of you!  And so few

pigeon heros, or dastards,

and also, I think,

so few affairs since

each and every character

mates

for life—the history of pigeons is a story

with no wars, and no sons

elected bishop, just over and again

the tale of how you rose

on a January morning

on wings nearly

white against

a bank

of darker cloud, and I read this

and was thankful

to be cold, here, waiting

on the train, nearly

able

to love the world the way

a flock of pigeons loves

the sky.