Poetry News:
- — If birds come from something as bizarre as a smooth ovoid container with no exit or entry, then it’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that the backbone of a corpse becomes a snake —
- — WordPlay - WPVM: Celebrating Jonathan Williams [links to MP3] —
- — 2008 National Magazine Award Finalists —
- — Interview with poet Mark Doty:A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire” & Mark Doty Video at Split This Rock —
- — Editors Kathryn Stripling Byer and Marilyn Kallet gathered contributions from 52 female writers —
- — Posthumously published, these poems by one of the great masters of the short story deal largely with aging and death —
- — The sense of unknowing you feel at the end of a poem is not something you get and then get over. —
- — Bishop’s poetry takes up about the first third of this Library of America volume; the rest is prose of varying kinds and interest — fiction and memoir, travel and literary pieces, translations and correspondence, some published for the first time —
Lest you think I’m not an idiot, I am. Before I even got my MFA I sent a poetry manuscript out to poetry contests. Even now that I’m wised up about poetry contests, there are some presses that I really like so I enter to support them (NMP’s chapbook contest deadline is coming up FYI). So yeah, I’m a hypocrite. 
Thursday I’m meeting with the folks at the Vanderbilt Division of Medical Genetics. Wish me luck. I don’t know what to expect, though I know where they will be heading. Unfortunately, I’m in a lot of pain these days & didn’t help things when I slipped Saturday & fcked up my r. hip. Note to self: do not taunt Pluto.
Tags: Alice Fogel, Elizabeth Bishop, Frieda Hughes, Grace Paley, Jonathan Williams, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Marilyn Kallet, Mark Doty, Michael Longley, WordPlay, WPVM