Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

I currently have three poems online at Counterexample Poetics. The first, “Chant for the Whole” is a clear formal departure from my usual poetics, and it’s my third or fourth attempt to write a poem out of my sheer irritation with the life-coachy advice that if people want to succeed they shouldn’t “think like a victim”. To achieve the slant repetition, I had to bring in briefly stated examples of the less-subtle sorts of victim-blaming it resembles; the repetition imitates and intimates just how often we hear such rhetoric. Whether the content led to repetition or the repetition led to content would be impossible for me to say: I owe the tangle to intuition or poetry martians.

The third poem, “Zales/Jared/Kay” also began in irritation. This time it was with a jewelry commercial. Any guesses which one? Apparently, irritation makes me want to repeat myself.

Between these two poems, “Titanoboa cerrejonensis” started out as a more light-hearted piece about the recently discovered fossilized remains of a giant snake. Unfortunately, that light-heartedness got lost in a slaughterhouse.

This is apparently the sort of thing I write when I’m extremely happy.

The Death Mook, to be released in February 2009, contains my flash fiction/prose poem/monologue/thingy, Death of an Eikaiwa

ETA: Due to distance, I will be unable to attend, but I encourage anyone in or near Melbourne to head out to The Death Mook release party.

Courtesy of the AP (who forces their reporters to listen to this garbage so we don’t have to) comes a prime example of doublthink from the departing “president”:

The president said that while it’s true that Saddam was not connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to oust him cannot be viewed in isolation.

“In a world where terrorists armed with boxcutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction,” Bush said, referring to intelligence reports that later proved false.

So to recap: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but 9/11 meant we had to attack Iraq. I suppose I should just go tell every publisher who rejected my writing this year that, even though their rejection had nothing to do with the state of the economy, they should accept my work now or else I’ll bomb them, since in a world in which the economy can collapse overnight we cannot risk allowing the poetry market to freeze up. Or something.

Today I received my contributor’s copy of Makeout Creek’s second issue, which includes two of my poems. “Fruit of Two Summers” presents a voice trying to descibe the taste the taste of yellow mangoes (such as I had while in China) only to find these efforts interrupted by the eruption of unpleasant memories of a relationship infused with sexualized violence. The speaker tries to create distance between herself and the memories through the use of the second person, but this also creates an effect of self-admonishment. The tasting the fruit becomes an effort to forget, but the poem ends with the focus on the bitter flavor of the skin—possibly an imperfect victory yet not definitely so.

I find it more difficult to describe “Iron-Rich & Tightly Packed”. It starts out with identification with an entire Pacific Northwest landscape and then that sense of projected self moves more tightly into a particular tree. It is, in its way, a love poem.

Jon Sealy’s poem, “Small Divagation”, begins with an image of lint on a sweater then follows a long chain of associations down to a light but seemingly real image of a night watchman. The poem’s speaker, unlike the one in my “Fruit of Two Summers” which appears on the facing page, does not resist the images but, rather, urges the reader to listen to the description of them.

The issue also includes an intriguing character sketch over breakfast, “We are in agreement about the funny-tasting eggs”, a short story by Matthew Stuart. The narrator’s obsessive seeking of himself in the background of news photos brings up issues of narcissism and the panopticon without preaching or falling into clichés about 15 minutes of fame. Other works also show a degree of social conscience that indicates a strong effort on the editors’ part to make this part of the journal.