There’s a 2010 Poetry Book giveaway at Book of Kells with about 84 free books & 2 free year subscriptions to Crab Creek Review. The idea is to share what you love — one must be written by someone not you.
April 10th is the cutoff for participants as givers in this. After that you can participate as the winner of a draw and receive two books or chapbooks by mail.

On March 23rd there was panel discussion on Meaning at the Tree Reading Series of Sina Queyras, Rob Winger, Susan McMaster and Erín Moure.
(A better picture is John W MacDonald’s here]
Here are some gleanings from my jottings. (No vid of the event went online yet.)
Susan said the essential quality of poetry is the act of paying attention.
There was some discussion on how Lucy versus Rae Armantrout respond to Dickinson. Are loose ends all tightly wound and tucked or let be directions outward?
Sina talked about how what you say comes as a response from the context of what you can’t say.
Erín said that when you consider it, writing is preposterous when you could just talk. To go to the trouble to write assumes a wider audience that you wouldn’t normally talk to which brings in the element of the communication being an ethical gesture.
When asked how closely he followed the actual life or Muybridge, Rob in part of his response raised the question, why not fabricate for pleasure? In different kinds of stories there is a diiferent ethical weight to embellishment.
Sina talked about a series of exercises she gave to make a poem of 1) a nagging childhood worrysome memory
2) an historical event 3) a hated peer 4) a poem that combines the previous 3. This gives a space between self and the inner moral judgements that you do and do not want to make and forces a posit of a fiction.
Rob said that to ask meaning from a poem can be a nonsensical question as much as why is platform back updown your banana face? There’s a tyranny in a priority categories.
Erín said that to reduce a poem to what you already explicitly consciously know and be consistant with what you know is to confine yourself to sense and known things but to make sense of something is the job of the reader. To write and to read is to reach beyond what you already know.

This is Visual Poetry has an online catalogue of the new full-color chapbook series. If you’re not familiar this is great overview. If you are familiar, new work by people you know.
Speaking of people known and not (terrible segue) you’ve seen the Griffin list?
Lastly, scans of the Haiku Canada 10th Anniversary Holographic Anthology from 1987.
And Peter Ciccariello at National Poetry Month.

A next installment of small press publisher interviewers is on Apt 9 Press where the gravity of love of things is talked about. People naturally take a roll and a role to what they care about,

I think these communities always move between cities, between writers and publishers. If you care about the chapbook form, I think you’ll seek out people doing similar things in other places, and other times. I think a writer needs a community (however big or small), and communities need other communities. In absolute isolation it is very difficult to accomplish much of anything.

Cameron Anstee of Apt. 9 Press is also going to be one of the facilitators for the Tree Reading Series workshops on June 8, 6:45-7:45 at Arts Court Building.

There’s a new online space called WILLA i.e. Women in Letters and Literary Art. Fresh up is Amy King who is following up a decade later on Ursula K Le Guin’s 1999 talk, “Award and Gender,” in which she tallied up the historical counts of many major literary awards. It is included in her collection of essays, The Wave in the Mind. In it there was a 10:1, 8:1, 6:1 male to female as common.
The Count for 2009 checks on how things are now. Genre fiction and children’s literature is going its own parity path but in other sections, there’s still quite a skew on the order of 4:1 or sometimes 2:1 just within 2009. I’d have to line it all up on a chart to see trend lines but it does seem on the face of it, both discouraging and hopeful.
A touchstone for noticing cultural habits of gender is the Bechdel Test for a movie, comics, conversation or book

1. Has at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.
It’s surprisingly rare.