Poetry Hut Blog
baseball

Poetry News:

1. — The actress has been lambasted as old and out of touch for her controversial views on modern verse —
2. — A slap to poetry in Indiana? ow —
3. — Hoftsra researchers dig into times of slave poet —
4. — Poet Kay Ryan On Words, Writing —
5. — This week’s poem is by the greatest poet of all time —
6. — The poet turned war criminal enjoyed the protection of loyal Bosnian Serbs during his years on the run —
7. — Poetry about absence reflects mature growth —

“What happened Tuesday night was definitely a rare occurrence and one we should not expect to see again in our lifetimes”

Poetry News:

1. — Readers solve ‘lost’ poet mystery —
2. — To the Editor: In his review of Frank O’Hara’s “Selected Poems” (June 29), William Logan … —
3. — Poetry Everywhere? Yes, Everywhere! —
4. — From great landscapes spring fine poetry, but which scenes of inspiration and dedication stick most in the mind? —
5. — Ex-Poet Phelps suits up for Orioles —
6. — Why Africa needs to invest in its own literature —
7. — “Airing out books after the monsoon rains have passed” is a seasonal reference used by haikuists —
8. — WPVM’s Wordplay Podcast with Landon Godfrey [mp3] —

Fastest Known Muscles Found in Songbirds’ Throats

Poetry News:

1. — Much ado as £15m book is recovered —
2. — The Clerihew winner —
3. — Although I’d like to think that “poem” is not a four-letter word, to most people it probably is an obscenely elitist pastime. —
4. — Words such as “swatvac” and “ridgey didge” may not be normally associated with sonnets but they’re there, as are references to Ikea and Target. —
5. — For instance, why don’t you use hair conditioner? —
6. — Poet Alfred Arteaga, professor of Chicano and ethnic studies, dies at 58 —
7. — If Gloria’s generous 330-odd pages demonstrate how substantial Hill’s body of work is, The Hat shows this brilliant lyricist of human darkness writing more acutely than ever —

The pool yesterday was wonderful.

George Carlin on baseball vs. football:

link

On this date in 1970: Dock Ellis pitches a no-hitter while on LSD.

His biography, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, was written with Donald Hall.

Best wishes to him and his family as he awaits a liver transplant.

Poetry News:

1. — Comparing the Processing of Music and Language Meaning Using EEG and fMRI Provides Evidence for Similar and Distinct Neural Representations —
2. — Poetry can be true without being True —
3. — Lamantia anticipated by decades the elegant involutions and torqued interiority made familiar to us by other poets influenced by Surrealism such as Paul Celan and John Ashbery —
4. — “I must have been a fierce particle,” she marveled in a 2003 conversation with Spires. —
5. — Of verse and violent crime —
6. — A Yale-educated WASP, Matthews mocked the tight-lipped stoicism that was his birthright, while elevating it into high style. —
7. — “It’s for everybody,” she said. “It’s music. If you love music, you love poetry. It’s for everyone.” —
8. — Just when Almereyda has inclined us to the notion that agitprop can be noble, sincere and effective, Night Wraps The Sky accounts for the simultaneous unraveling of Mayakovsky’s life and Lenin’s communism. —
9. — a list of print journals that accept email submissions —
10. — As a new biopic probes the life and loves of Dylan Thomas, the writer’s daughter gives her verdict to biographer Andrew Lycett —

America has always struggled to live up to ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the freedoms written by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. Nowhere has this idea played out more visibly than on the baseball field where men and women have fought to cross racial, cultural, and gender barriers for the equal opportunity to play the game. In conjunction with our spring 2008 exhibit, Baseball as America, the National Constitution Center presents “Baseball: The Melting Pot,” a special conversation about the ways in which the game of baseball has served as a reflection of our social tensions as well as ideals, and our struggle to become a more inclusive society: MP3.

Poetry News:

1. — ‘Book of hours’ has rare female voice —
2. — Avant-garde cockney slammed for slang that doesn’t rhyme —
3. — Suggested blog topic: The Career Poet and How to Make Money & Influence People —
4. — Job: Associate Editor/Staff Writer - St. Louis Cardinals (St. Louis, MO) —
5. — Editor and translator Cor van den Heuvel is a haiku aficionado whose single-image poems capture moments from my own baseball-centered childhood —
6. — North Jersey also gives Kleinzahler his other great subject: American masculinity, the qualities we attribute to tough guys and men —
7. — As Memorial Day nears, James Winn lauds these works of war poetry —
8. — Ancient poem found on wood strip —
9. — So how much Morse, in iambic pentameters or otherwise, is out there? —

Trouble And Honey (I capped the “and” in the title because I thought it looked better, with that font I used haha.) results:

It’s been just over a week since the blog post that announced the availability of my book. There are just under 300 readers of this blog’s feed (296, according to Feedburner) plus 100-200 actual-human-being-visitors per day, so there are about 400 to 500 regular readers of Poetry Hut Blog every day. The blog tends toward the higher traffic when something negative is going on - scandal, death, po-biz in-fighting, etc.

400 people = daily readership (-ish)

83 downloads of free PDF version of Trouble And Honey = about 20% of readership (or the inverse = 80% were uninterested)

5 individuals donated via PayPal = (6% of 83 downloads; 1.25% of readership) This is better than the .06% that was recently referenced in the NYT, though my sample is way smaller. [link found in the techdirt rss feed thank you]

(Glass is half-empty: 98.75% of readership and 94% of downloaders did not donate.)

13 individual *orders* at Lulu.com = 3.25% of readership or 15.6% of downloaders (though some of the orders were for multiple copies — for example, someone bought 5 at once, maybe a sibling — Lulu.com doesn’t specify who the purchasers are BTW)

So there you have it. Check my math (muscle relaxants LOL).

Thank you & also, Americans, have a nice holiday tomorrow. I’ll be thinking about those who took an oath to defend the US Constitution.

Poetry News:

1. — Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is so moved by a shipwreck that he starts writing again —
2. — Quiet, dear, Mummy’s writing —
3. — Pulp Fiction was a seminal film. Will Shakespeare was a seminal poet. Obviously it follows that the two should be mixed together, which is exactly what has been done at Pulp Bard. LOL —
4. — But Pritikin is taking nothing for granted, and continues to promote Wrigley’s salvation. Here is his poem to rally the troops —
5. — Pupils were asked to imagine how it feels to be imprisoned without access to a fair trial and then express their feelings in the form of a poem —
6. — Alexander Pope’s longest and most elaborate poem, The Dunciad, has a good claim to be the greatest unread poem in the language. —
7. — place the pauses in his lines in different places and you get different poems, like removing the dashes from Emily Dickinson’s poems —

“Guns buried in flowers” is how Schumann described them.

ha.

ps. I hope you moms have a nice Mother’s Day today.

Poetry News:

1. — There is little that can make us as acutely conscious of the fact that we are still alive as being shown the body of someone who is dead —
2. — Start a Notebook on Poets.org - 30 Ways To Celebrate National Poetry Month —
3. — “if anything the poem and video are poking fun at a stereotype of libertarianism” —
4. — In recent years, the splendid American poet Elizabeth Bishop has undergone both a canonization and a demystification —
5. — Lighght Verse —
6. — The poem that saved a terribly English spy from death in Dublin —
7. — Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott is one of the great mongrels of American poetry, serving as a singular melting pot for a variety of traditions —
8. — Detroit Tiger Haikus —
9. — Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it —

My brother Jason has posted a bunch of word games / word puzzles on his blog.

Poetry News:

1. — There should be a place for more original poetry to be posted and shared - let’s start right here —
2. — Needed: Contemporary Visual Poetry for Poetry —
3. — Psalms offer source of inspiration for prayer —
4. — University Comes To Aid Of Literary Magazine —
5. — Here are 15 short poems as animated films. They’re the first in a series from Poetry Everywhere, a fresh initiative to introduce new audiences to poetry through cinema —
6. — Custom Ringtones From Poets.org —
7. — The UK’s biggest poetry competition, founded in 1978, attracts thousands of entries – here are this year’s winners —
8. — Mr. Williams founded the Jargon Society, a small publishing house that has introduced the works of little-known writers, photographers and artists —

A Veteran MAD Man Remains in the Fold

Yay, baseball. As always, there’s free baseball poetry in a PDF chapbook here. The Nashiville Sounds’ first home game is on the 11th.

Poetry News:

1. — This poem was written by thirteen-year-old Helen Keller (1880-1968) who, only six years before, was “a wild little creature” —
2. — new small press alert —
3. — Byron, Shelley and Miss Havisham —
4. — MLB Poetry Previews: Boston Red Sox —
5. — Romantic, Surrealist, clear-as-glass, impenetrable charlatan: Ashbery has been called all of these —
6. — new lit mag alert —
7. — Markov chains appear in everything from mathematics to music to gambling to Google searches, but Allmann decided to put a different spin on the algorithm by feeding it poetry —
8. — Beth Ann Fennelly’s best poems are as noisy as a rat in a coffee can —

Could be worse.

Poetry News:

1. — Why this bevy of bards, this plethora of poetry, this Vesuvian eruption of verse? —
2. — MLB Poetry Preview: Chicago Cubs —
3. — My first reaction was, “What are you smoking?” —
4. — This week, the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of … a mobile poetry archive providing free access to a collection of more than 2,500 poems —
5. — Today, Sam Leith profiles the highly-influential poet of the English revolution, John Milton —
6. — With 16 books between them, four authors will take part in the first “Gathering of Tennessee Writers” at MTSU, on Thursday, March 20, 4:30 p.m. —
7. — All contemporary poetry when it is contemporary is initially baffling to its readers —
8. — Introducing seven of the greatest poets of the 20th century —

Poetry News:

1. — Some of his latest readings include the collected works of American poet Robert Creeley and poet Lyn Hejinian’s book “My Life.” —
2. — American Ghazals —
3. — Hickory poet Scott Owens will have his third chapbook of poems published online in April by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature —
4. — A copy of a poetry book hailed as one of the most important in English history has been bought for £42,000 —
5. — Why the worst artists deserve recognition —
6. — Kenmore native is a poet and entrepreneur —
7. — To write poems about seeing, you have to disappear; it is essential to relinquish your so-called perspective —
8. — At a special SELECTED SHORTS live performance, the Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor and writer John Lithgow selected his favorite story poems from his anthology, THE POETS’ CORNER and read them along with celebrated performance artist Bill Irwin [MP3 ha that Gertrude Stein was fun] —
9. — Frost’s ‘47 lecture finally gets printed —
10. — No one, surely, will take exception to my list of phobic-friendly poetry —

CALL FOR PAPERS

Twelfth Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture
Friday, March 28, 2008
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN

Keynote Address: Dr. Peter Carino, Indiana State University

Luncheon Speaker: Orestes Destrade, ESPN Baseball Tonight commentator
and former MLB and Japanese League player

The Twelfth Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture, is
soliciting 1-2 page proposals for presentations to be given at the
conference on Friday, March 28, 2008. Presenters will have 15-20
minutes. Proposals should summarize the talk as clearly as possible. The
conference theme defines “culture” loosely: in addition to baseball
literature, topics could include aspects of baseball history, baseball
and urban development, ballpark design, baseball and economics, baseball
and media, baseball in painting or music, readings of creative works
(fiction, non-fiction essays, memoirs, poems, plays), and so on. All
presentations must follow the 15-20 minute format. Statistical analyses
of teams and players are not wanted.

Proposals should make clear how baseball relates to some aspect of
local, ethnic, national or international culture; we are particularly
interested in accepting proposals related to Negro League baseball and
culture. Include on the proposal your name, address, phone number, and
e-mail address. Proposals should be sent to Dr. Ron Kates, Department of
English, Box 70, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN
37132, or by e-mail to rkates@mtsu.edu. The deadline for proposals is
January 21, 2008. Writers will be notified of acceptance by February
11, 2008. Conference registration fee is $60 (for both presenters and
attendees), which may be paid either in person or by mail. Presenters
may have the opportunity to submit papers for possible publication in a
volume of conference proceedings to be published by McFarland.