Now this is cool. A solution to two problems at once.
a) How to format online text with spaces in poetry without a huge amount of characters, and
b) to do erasure poetry without an image that would be slow to load.
Mairead Byrne takes a news story and just changes the text color to white except what remains for the poem. Elegant, simple solution.
The blog generally has interesting things to say, and is a link or two away from e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s of interviews of poets about poetics by Tom Beckett. Like Jordan Stempleman saying,

I’d look down upon the parents for not reading poetry to their kids when they were very young while they were on the toilet. It’s the best place, you got ‘em, and they have this wonderful look of concentration on their face. […]
My daughter, now three and a half, each time she sits down for an extended stay on the toilet will call me in from the other room and ask me to read her poetry. Now granted, she usually stops me at every fourth or fifth word to ask me what it means or to laugh and repeat it because sonically it just sounds wild, but that’s great stuff, no? Adults are way too freaked out to do those kinds of things. Workshop students better find the paradigmatic happenings in the poem or it’s strike three! My readers tend to be those who don’t worry so much about cracking anything. They connotatively feel the language and respond. At least that’s what the one reader I know I have does.

One last thing, Paul Hostovsky’s poems in Umbrella — love their whimsy. They’ve got a Tom Wayman-likeness to their narratives. But of a whole other character and not to be missed is Christina Pocosz, an excerpt,

Remember the iridescent
plumage of the hummingbird
is black
without the light.
Black like a branch
bereft of the life of the living
leaves, charcoal waiting
for the flame.

The cadence word and image reach me in concert, a knot of carollers when I least expect it on a snowy afternoon.

“Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.” — Wayne Dyer
The AWP (The Association of Writers & Writing Programs est. 1967) Conference is now on in Georgia. In 2008 it’s in NYC January 30 and February 2. It has:
· More than 400 Presses, Publishers, & Journals at AWP’s Bookfair
· More than 275 scheduled events
According to January O’Neil it is

one of the largest professional conferences for writers in the United States. It brings together educators, students, writers, editors, publishers, and literary aficionados to discuss the writing life, specifically the business of poetry.

With speakers and topics still to be announced…
The 11th year of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Spring Edition, will be Sunday, April 15 to Sunday, April 22, 2007.
The 9th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival will be April 25-29, 2007.
The Haiku Canada conference will be in Ottawa May 18-20.

Ann White’s piece on getting into the method of Louise Gluck is useful to me. Having read only part of one book by Gluck I wasn’t sure I could get a general sense of what she does since it didn’t grab me and I’m poor at keeping at reading something that doesn’t grab me. White’s sensitive reading in perspective of having read other works really helped get a context of what Gluck could be reacting to. Ann White also has some insight on how Mary Oliver’s Osprey works with a soft touch and slow draw.

When writers have written a lot it’s hard for me to decide how much I have to know to have a passable half-way acceptable level of knowledge. I suppose what I am doing to reacting to these words in this moment to me now. I don’t have to grasp the whole person. It doesn’t help to say that. I still feel like I’m reading blindfolded. Collected Works of Creeley for instance weighs in at 662 pages. Yes, I’m pagist but there’s a dauntingness to knowing how little I’ve read represents. Even if I finish these two books, drop in the bucket.

I’m way behind in non-paper reading but a month ago Anne Boyer said of writing down snippets of impressions,

To occupy oneself with projects of no interest to anyone is a generally winning idea. To be of no interest to anyone is a reliable evolutionary strategy as exemplified by birds whose feathers are the color of dirt, rabbits who turn white in the winter, green caterpillars, chameleons, etc.

I love the whimsy of putting these two ideas side by side. Writing ideas is a processing, a pleasure, an internalizing of the world with or without agreeing, or even being interested in it. It’s an acknowledging, coming into ideas, touching, interacting, being a unconscious and conscious part of the environment instead of pointedly ignoring and being mentally divided from where one actually is. Is it an evolutionary advantage to wear ideas that camouflage or are red vinyl ideas that don’t relate to the wetlands and fields? If one knows one is wearing what one is consciously as a counterpoint to better see the palette, does that change the relationship of fit?

(So it ain’t sophisticated but it amused me. :))

Actionable Joy
“An opal holds a fiery spark, But a flint holds fire.” — Christina Rossetti

We hold these ruses to be self-evident: baubles of trouble-
d double D legend are poignant, a jinxed tragic beauty we must scrape
to. How to keep pap and pope held above all the rabble of a good
bawdy joke? We are brought up short, a jerk of the shoulder
curt word to ensure we heard young man what a world this is.

A bombing is not enough, the one more scarce than scary —
must be re-run in syndication, spun into articles, editorials
plethoraing. Dramatization queens are made, not born. Vigilance is
trustmost, a curse borne by
all who are Responsible Denizens. Pray
we look at archives of international lists
compiled, trotted out his- and her-stories,
cross-reference to thicken where thin with
unibomber or do-wrongers, patch and scrap up
some fear-factor(TM) morality, be a good laddie,
poll someone quick before momentum
flits off to those damned flowers and sunshine again.

We must keep people Aware of how much Danger they
are in, how many (by number not percentage) once
screwed up something which we can’t bear
to ever let
anyone live down
because trauma
is not
to be trifled with
except for profit or propheteering.

Hurry, hurrah against all this counterevidence
mounding around the homeless man
who has a name we dare not note
he who
as if equal (imagine!)
ruffles the hair of the Clean-Coated Boy
who turns, smiles with his dad
glances back without a care (careless is a better paraphrase)
dad who adds a nice-sort-of-day-isn’t-it wave.

And the woman who falls on the intersection and
blame hardly has time to reach lips when a suit swifts over
soothing words, lifts her, checks she is
fine, tears not even with time to get out of ducts.
How is one to work up a good funk unless we blot
with the ruthless practicality of kittens sacks and stones…

We won’t even discuss how people keep talking with family
and colleagues or how when they break up
have the sense to shrug
and get on with other things.
Such harassment of relentless coping
and feel-good copy must be stopped. How dare people
keep breathing air, not be stricken with parts per million broken,
forget the majority that works.

Words bitten back in considerations,
spoken kindly, resilient healing
more tyranical than manical’s most celebrated hopes
goods and money to buy it and airports of people greeting people
they missed. Yes, con-
centrate on the ache of miss.
Bang that pang. Hammer,
no, no, they weren’t fine before.
They weren’t in contact all the
way in line by text. Think of poverty, depravity, abuse.

Let me dig up some files for you.

Each life has pain enough you say.
Now we’re getting somewhere aren’t we? Roma have been
failed by some institutional schooling and have tin shacks,

happiness study says poor are happier and have a community
of support, laughter, long lasting points pass
like ships in dark night of souls. Incandescence of critical
observation should be outlawed, already is in some areas
you know but what is scandulous and when I count to 4 you
will wake and do a headless chicken whenever I say war. 1, 2…

“When I’m awake, conscious working in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half-asleep. When I’m in that half sleep there is a kind of vigilance.” Jacques Derrida in interview