Dear Village Toymaker,

I want to thank you for the miniature horses, I’ll never

know how you so precisely

attach

their wings, and if that material is a kind

of cellophane, or specialized paper,

at any rate it allows them

to hover

in the living room.

like a herd of four-legged wasps.

I also appreciate the firefly reunion pack

you include

with every purchase, it’s certainly added

a splotch of glitz to our toddler’s bedroom,

and I love how you have them trained

to settle

on the headboard and wink

at the window until an hour

before dawn.

Making Helen Adams Proud

I took myself on a poetry date yesterday, celebrating the at-long-last seasonable spring weather and my new work schedule that gives me Saturdays off. I headed downtown to the Harold Washington Library to see Campbell McGrath read.  I like his work, especially the long-lined poems that wrestle with American culture.  In the Q and A portion of the reading he was asked a question I couldn't quite hear about rap music.  I could hear his reply, which was basically that there are two strains of poetry in American culture: the popular, populist, poetry of rap and slam-style work, and the more sedate and cloistered poetry of academia.  He said we must remember that poetry is at its root a performance art--poetry was meant to be heard out loud, and enjoyed by groups of people listening to the poet. He added that both strains of poetry could learn from each other, and that the strongest work being done currently was a hybrid mix of the two.

 After the reading I bought a copy of his latest book, In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, got McGrath to sign a copy for me, (he was very pleasant but I think a bit tired and ready for to be out of there) and then I went upstairs, in a grand marble library room, to work on a piece for my upcoming gig with the Tuesday Funk reading series.  It takes inspiration from three things: my recent fascination of the freaky dark ballads of Helen Adams, my long-time obsession with spiders, and my recent discovery that there were servants in the middle ages called "spider brushers," people whose job it was to brush spiders and other vermin off of the nobility in the house. So I am writing "The Ballad of the Spider Brusher's Son."

It rhymes, it hopefully will work well aloud, and it contains some of the darkness, gore, and twisted sexuality that Helen Adams' work contained. I have another draft or two to get through, but its going to be ready for its debut. I want to make Helen proud.

"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.

April

I used to always be a bit sour on National Poetry Month.  "Here," we tell Poetry.  "Have a month.  We'll do a special issue, we'll interview a laureate, we'll publish a poem on our website, and then we can relax and and ignore You as soon as April is over."


But I've mellowed somewhat.  The national media, and indeed our nation and our culture, do not pay much attention to poetry and do not value it as an art form or as a commodity.  Why should I sneer at poetry getting it's few scraps of attention? I won't be attempting a poem a day for 30 days, like some people I know. (Worthy an endeavor as that is.)  But here is a place with prompts for those of you considering such a move:

1. http://kristinberkey-abbott.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-poetry-prompt-for-every-day-in-april.html
 
And here is such a cool National Poetry Month project:  I wish I were involved in this: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/about/

What i will be doing is working hard on a manuscript of letter poems, trying to finish as much of it as I can.  I think I'll throw in the goal of submitting 12 batchs of work to 12 differenct journals or websites, while I'm at it.

It's also National Sexually Transmitted Disease Awareness Month. Just so you know.

Vacancy

Dear Vacancy,

You’ve remained on the buzzing

neon sign at the Driftwood Inn

on Red Arrow Highway for so long now

that folks

might start to wonder

if you secretly

own

the place:

the sandlot out front where

stray cats like to scratch,

and yellowed bones

of beech trees near that ditch

by the road. The shutters

on the windows?

They’re fake, and look, one’s

fallen off. Blue

paint on the doors, it tears away

like strips of paper;

the only rented rooms

are the yellowjacket nests.

Live and on Stage!

I will be reading live and in person at three venues in the next three months.  It's like a mini-tour, but all within Chicago, so it has a slightly larger scope than the "tiny tour" that Dorothea Lasky did a couple years ago, where she did readings in different rooms in her apartment.  You can read more about that worthy project here. But enough about that, what about MY readings?  I am sure you are dying to know. So here they are in chronological order.

1. Thursday, March 21 at 6:30 PM.  Poetry night at City Lit Books! Local poets Jen Besemer, Robert McDonald, and Richard Fox read work. The three of us are long-time friends and sometime collaborators, and we'll all be reading poems that use collage or spring from other texts as part of our reading.

2. Thursday, April 25th at 7 PM. Poetry night at The Book Cellar. This will be the 6th or 7th year in a row that Richard Fox and I have read at The Book Cellar for National Poetry Month.  Jen Besemer will be joining in the fun here too, and I think a couple of other colleagues will be joining us. I love this place, and the owner Suzy rocks.  So does the cheese plate you can buy here to go with your glass of wine.


3. Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 7:30 PM. Reading at the Tuesday Funk series, right in my own neighborhood of Andersonville, at the Hopleaf. This will without a doubt be the reading with the best beer selection in the city that night. Readers include:

• Suzanne Clores
• Mary Beth Hoerner
• Robert McDonald
• Dion Walton
• Sara Ross Witt

This dog on a picnic table really wants you to make it to one of these readings.  See the concerned expression on his big face.