April 25th, Ted Kooser's Birthday, the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion

Well, I started to write this on the 25th, and then fell asleep, and then I procrastinated a little bit, so it is now the 27th- but I can't be bothered to look up anything about today, so I'm sticking with what I had for the 25th.

Happy slightly belated birthday to Ted Kooser, who consistently delivers punches precisely where it matters and scatters snowflakes over the aches.
Here is one of my favourite poems from Ted:

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.


Also, today is the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion! Not quite as cheery as Mr. Kooser's birthday, but significant nonetheless.

I'm currently awash with stuff to do, trying to plow through a new grant proposal, keep up with my tutoring and my writing students, write these two novels, write poem letters to Emma, sew an Elizabethan corset, and oh yeah, prepare a playlist of music for recording. Too many things!

So I'm at one of my favourite new Austin cafes, Monkey Nest, enjoying the wide open space and the light through the windows, and the bizarre playlist alternating between the Killers and Modest Mouse, with the occasional Beatles, Stones, or Cake song thrown in, for spice. Last week it was a run of Three Dog Night and 70's tunes- heaven!

One of the things I adore about this cafe (besides the fact that I get to hang out with Merri Su every time I come!) is how light and open it is, and, of course, their delicious Turkish spice tea. I'm so used to my usual haunts on the East side- Rio Rita, Cherrywood, etc- which are all lovely and funky, but also a bit dark and enclosed. Although there is the big plus that I can get alchohol in those places, to you know, help me get through my workload.

So I've written a few new pieces in the last week, and in even more exciting news, just had a poem accepted by the print journal Alimentum, which is a gorgeous publication that focuses on literature about food. Which is, of course, my favourit type of literature. The actual journal will be the Summer edition, so it won't be out for a few months, but what an inspiration! One step back, two steps forward!

Another tremendous inspiration that has surfaced in the past few days is, interestingly, my little brother. In the past few days he has chased multiple tornados across north Texas with a team of stormchasers, documenting cloud rotation, twisters, wind and lightning. He almost got hit by lightning, actually. I'm so jealous and incredibly inspired by his work! If I can get my hands on a few of his photos from this latest adventure, I'll post them in my next entry.

Willows Wept, April 16th

Well, I've searched, but the only notable thing about April 16th is that it's possibly the day that Odysseus returned from the Trojan war. Otherwise, nothing. It is a pretty mundane day.

However, I'm super excited, because I've just had a poem accepted to the Willows Wept Review, which is an online publication that I really enjoy. So, today is at least notable in the realm of my small, goofy life.

I can't actually believe that I've neglected to post anything for three days- I don't know where those three days went, but I suspect they might have been stolen by yoga. Next week is going to be shanghaied by a raw food diet, along with lots of yoga. Where in the world did this usage of "shanghai" come from, anyway? It feels a bit like saying "I was tokyoed into driving to the docks". Weird. It always seemed natural when people said it, but as I write the oddness of it is really striking.

A Chapbook, a Star Poem, Loss, and the Garden of Eden

Happy April 13th- I'm too lazy to look up why this day is significant. Actually, it's significant to me because I have finally finished a new poem! It is the 11th or 12th installment in the Letters to Emma collection, and I finally got to use all of my star terminology.

So the lovely Emma Bartholomew and I have finally started to knuckle down on two ongoing projects:
The first is a chapbook of letter poems that has been a work-in-progress since our frantic dissertation scramble last summer.
The second is a novella (I'm not keeping my fingers crossed for it to reach novel length) set in the Garden of Eden. It's almost to seventy pages at the moment, so we're aiming for some further development, but not to actually triple the length or anything.

So, on top of the full length novel that I'm having a kickboxing match with every day, these two projects are in full force launch as well. Whew, and I actually need to find another job. What a silly world!

SO, I know I missed my update/NMP entry yesterday, but that was due to the fact that I was actually doing some writing, so...

The end of the Tokugawa

April 11th, marking the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

My phrase for the day, funded in part by the ever inspiring dialogue of Radiolab, is



"empires of time".

There's a poem here, I'm sure. Is there a poem here for anyone else? Any takers?

Day 10, Bill Callahan has got poetry

Well, I have only written half of a sentence that didn't make any particular sense today, BUT, it was not a complete bust for a few reasons.

First of all, I reencountered Rilke, and find myself, again, in love with a dead writer. Thanks to Book People for letting me wander around with a book of his selected poetry without purchasing it.

Second, and this was the reason I was in Book People in the first place this afternoon, I had the pleasure of listening Bill Callahan read again from his "Letters to Emma Bowlcut". He started in the middle this time- very little introduction (except for the wonderfully awkward "I never know if I should do an introduction or not- I've never been to a reading in my life"), four or five of the letters from the book, and then he says thanks and plops himself down to sign books. The whole episode was simple, awkward, and utterly charming. I love hesitant readings, as if the reader has a rhythm and an akwardness in their words that is unique to their mind, and the listener can't quite catch and hold onto it.
Also, I get all shaky when I look Bill in the eyes. This has happened before, and is very uncomfortable.

So Bill has got some poetry, and so does Rilke, and hopefully tomorrow I'll wax a little poetical myself- happy national poetry month day ten!

Alaska Day! Yoga! A few sentences eked out! NPM Day 9!

I'd like to wish everyone a happy "Anniversery of the Purchase of Alaska" Day! The day that we decided that there was gold to be got in that great frozen gorgeous land and promptly purchased it from the Russians.

It is also "Corinne jumps full on back into yoga day", and I keep wobbling and tripping into people's way, because I feel like jelly all over! Man, all of that driving back and forth between Santa Fe and Austin and the Grand Canyon and West Texas and whowhatsit to wheredoneit, plus some other life factors, has really janked my body up all weird. So today I got up after a whopping five hours of restless sleep and went to heated power yoga...not the easiest reentry point to the practise, but boy did it feel wonderfully intense! In a few hours I'm off to a meditation and breathing workshop for a little more centreing, then it's music with two of my favourite lovely ladies out at the farm. Gonna play the cello for the donkeys. Afterwards I will stumble, delirious in the bliss of it all, to an Irish session at my friend's home. What a lovely way to end a day chock full of all the things my soul and my body love!

But in this hour pause before any of that stuff, I am attempting to put in my writing time for the day. Poems about shyness and measuring people by brightness, and a few sentences added to tht torturous conversation between Adam and Simon. This is going to take a little slogging through, this scene. But onward and upward! The family dinner with Jocelyn, Beatrice, Simon, and Adam continues! Just to toss out a little more information for the sake of context, Jocelyn=one of the protagonists, and is Adam's sister. Beatrice is Adam and Jocelyn's mother, and Simon the father. Zoom in on typical Victorian family dinner setting, brace of pheasant and all, spiced up with a not-so-typical conversation involving alchemy, the clergy, the East India Company, and some dubious magicians.

Buddha's Birthday!

Happy eighth day of national poetry month, and Buddha's birthday (in Japan)!

I was listening to an episode of Radiolab this morning about scientific discoveries. What caught me particularly about this episode (though most of them bring me close to tears), was the discussion involving globular clusters, the formation of stars, and the period table. This took me back to a month ago, when I drove from Santa Fe to the McDonald Observatory in the Davis mountains of west Texas. I was attending a star party that evening, and popped into one of the various lectures that was going on, just in time to catch a few pieces of information which almost knocked me over. It is this information which the Radiolab episode brought to mind, and which I am now stirring and stewing into a poem. First, that our atoms are born of supernovas, which are where the densest elements like iron and calcium come from. Imagine, we have starstuff in our bones.
Second, that there is no shape to the universe.
And then there was a random assortment of words and phrases so beautiful that I can't stop shaping them with my mouth, tasting them, typing them on the page to admire their form: paralex, angular shift, ressession velocity.
All galaxies are moving away from us,
and,
distances are measured by brightness.

So I haven't worked on the novel today, but their are plenty of words in my thoughts.
Hopefully a poem will climb out of them soon.

Writing, procrastinating

Well, after a year, here I am again. It's national poetry month, and the month when I was birthed, so I have an idea.
It goes something like this-

Since I'm struggling with the challenge of writing a poem every day this month, I'm going to aim for just writing something. Even if it's a meaningless blog entry. At least my brain will have gotten a little word exercise. Is this productive, or procrastinating? Let's enjoy the mystery.

It's April 7th, good old World Health Day (I ate some arugula and am now sipping on a glass of plum wine- well, I was sipping on it, but now that the wine's gone I've deteriorated into gnawing on the alcoholic plum- so, fruits and veggie), anyway, April 7th, and I've written two poems and edited one. I'm a little behind the "poem a day" goal.

If only a paragraph added to the novel counted as a poem... and you know what, from now on it does. So I'm sitting with sticky plummy fingers in the orange Texas sunset, looking out the windows of my parents' house, and stuck on the same damn sentence of the novel that I've been stuck on for days.

It seems (and this is news to me, since this is my first novel) that there are some places in the story- innocent, innocuous seeming places- which present you with a turning point for a character or sequence of events. Or both. Or one that causes the other inadvertently. Anyway, I've been at such a point for the past couple days. The question is- does Simon approve, vaguely, of his son joining the East India Company? Or does he mistrust them at this point, and disapprove? All he has to do is answer his son's question "Do you think that a worthwile use of one's time?". And yet, with the response to this question he will either become a vague, scholarly father with only enough attention to the position of the East India Co. to know that the magicians involved in it (yes, magicians- the book is sent in an alternate 1840's England, full of fun things like alchemists) are quite skilled and knowledgeable, or- and this is a big "or"- is he quite quick witted and aware under all his vague exterior, and does he sense already that something isn't quite right with the EIC, be it their colonialisation policies or their shady magicians? Does he in some way approve of his son joining the EIC as a soldier, or does he think his son naive, and a fool? Does his son then join the Company as an act of rebellion to his father, or because he thinks to finally win his father's approval?

I wish Simon would just answer the damn question, so that I'd know.

Will hopefully have some movement in this scene by tomorrow, which is finally, blissfully, Friday.