Poetry News:

1. — This Ecstatic Nation: Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11 —
2. — Q&A: Rebecca Wolff’s Fence Turns Ten —
3. — Holy Road: Paula Gunn Allen (1939 - 2008) —
4. — He wanted to create, as he put it, “echoes realer / than originals.” Unfortunately, echoes have a nasty way of fading. —
5. — Elizabeth Kirschner’s book of poems, ‘My Life as a Doll,’ chronicles her memories of child abuse —
6. — Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago —
7. — It’s easy to forget that American poetry was not always as friendly to the middle class as it is today —

The book reviews at New Pages are fresh and so are the lit mag reviews

dancing girl press has opened the chapbook manuscript reading period — they make good chapbooks.

I like persona poems - a whole online lit mag issue of them

Poetry Midwest has an e-chapbook available as a downloadable PDF file.

My family member is back from Iraq - thank you for your prayers.

Poetry News:

1. — In ‘‘Elegy,’’ poet Mary Jo Bang has taken on one of the largest and most difficult subjects in all of literature —
2. — National Book Critics Circle finalists —
3. — John Milton: the poet who gave us ‘Star Trek’ and ‘The Matrix’ —
4. — Former poet laureate opening another chapter in his life —
5. — How lovely it is that there are words and sounds —
6. — John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Pinsky all wrote poems for him —
7. — he calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush, whom he calls “a booted, sombrero’d/cowboy Caligula/who couldn’t manage a straw/horse on a parade float…” —
8. — Ex-carpenter warms up tp poet laureate honor —
9. — Editorial: Frost home vandalism is deeply disturbing —
10. — Poets and jazz artists find rhythm and rhyme —
11. — Taslima Nasreen has been chosen for the prestigious Simon de Beauvoir feminist award in recognition of her writing on rights for women —
12. — Vendetta fear after poet murdered —
13. — Denise Clarke is entertaining as poet Anne Sexton in Sylvia Plath Must Not Die —
14. — If Fence magazine were an actual fence, it would be a portable one —
15. — A different kind of poetry concentrates more strikingly on expressiveness —

I’m going to Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in March. I bought a plane ticket but I don’t know where I’m staying yet. I’ve only been to D.C. once, for some computer security training. But I took a train to the Mall area and wandered around for half a day. Saw about an hour’s worth of the Smithsonian. I wish I had more time to see stuff but I won’t. I’d like to meet with my members of Congress, too, but I won’t be there on those specified constituent days. After all the letters I’ve written them I’m not sure their staff would schedule me anyway hahaha.

Poetry News:

1. — there is a growing sense that enough is enough ” and that the friction between old and new book media obscures the fact that the two are in bed together now —
2. — the growing body of Muslim American literature has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre —
3. — Mothers of Poetic Invention —
4. — WH Auden is to blame for everything that went wrong with English poetry —
5. — The reader can enter the poems, delight in them, and sometimes not be able to find a way out —
6. — Shakespeare gets comic treatment —

One of my ancestors came from this I kid you not village.

Interestingly, the “k” sound (or the “hard c”), as heard in “quack” and “duck”, has long been seen in the comedy world as especially funny.