Medusa's Head

I had to post something new. I was recently challenged to write a new chapbook in one month. Day 20, and I have 4 poems. Failure? We'll see. Anyway, one of the ideas I had for knocking out this ridiculous number of poems was to do pop haiku. I love the mix of the static, the contemplative, the classic form with the hectic, frenetic, undeliberated, the unending flow of pop life. Maybe the haiku can do something for Pop. But I suck at haiku! So you try it. Here's a contest if you're interested in doing on about a Nintendo game: http://kotaku.com/gaming/flackery/metroid-prime-2-echoes-haiku-contest-26589.php

This Week They Killed Your Best Friend in a Church While He Prayed, Although Many Could Save Your Life He Was The Only One that Would Now is the time when they are deciding who will decide who owns your body. If you are not a man or a child or a virgin you are a cruise ship, or your body is a cruise ship and you are the captain and if the ship goes down so will you. They decide if tiny people can kill you. You might have thought, oh yay, finally, my tiny person is coming only to discover they will brutalize you. The undertaker will have to stuff you so you won't look caved in for your casket though you don't have to die, you could maybe keep your body a little longer-- your body, whose job you thought it was to keep you alive and take you to work this body which is all you know has been lying to you. It is not yours. It never was. It is somebody else's, or could be just like that. And whether that person is alive, or will be for long your body, your long lost first love or ...

A few more upcoming publications to announce: "Rupture," The Greensboro Review "Garden Wall, Response to Picasso," Makeout Creek "Sugar Bust," Southern Women's Review Also, I've begun reviewing poetry books and chapbooks for Hayden's Ferry Review Blog. Check them out!

I recently started reviewing books and chapbooks for the HFR blog, one done so far and several to go! As I was reading Roy Seeger's chapbook, A Garden of Improbable Birds , I was struck by how much I enjoyed his poems featuring John Travolta and Lon Cheney. These were not comic poems, the pop icons were translated into symbols in the poems that really opened up something for the speaker. It was pretty cool. I had recently run into another Kalamazoo guy at AWP, Cody Todd, who also has a chapbook out, To Frankenstein, My Father . And another fellow Western Michigan Prague Summer Program attendee, was featured in HFR #42 for a poem entitled, "Gorbechev's Houseboat." Maybe that's not a very significant trend, but I've got my eye on these guys. So my question is, what is useful about pop icons? Dracula, Chocula, Lou Ferrigno, Billy Joel, Tanya Harding, Kelly Clarkson, Miley (sigh for contributing in any way to the continuation of her name in the metasphere) Cyrus?...

I'm back from AWP and then a short baby hiatus! The little guy is napping on his Boppy on my lap, so I'm going to catch up with some notes I made at AWP. I ran into an old friend at the book fair, Alex Lumans, graduating soon from his MFA program. When we were in an undergrad poetry class together, he wrote a cool poem using the word portmanteau , which I'd never encountered before. It's actually a pretty common occurrance, a portmanteau is two words smushed together to make a new one that has some of the old meaning of the two words combined. Think Bennifer or Brangelina but with more linguistic substance. Here's a cool site with a bunch of examples: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/portmant.htm I'm especially intriqued by the Dormobile . I was disapointed to find out that this is a type of car/truck/van, not a mobile dorm, which would suck so bad that I love the idea. Would you have to find it every day when you come home from class? Imagine the di...

Happily, I came back from AWP to a PO Box full of rejection slips, my new Indiana Review (yes!), and an acceptance from Slipstream for my poem, "Women Like Me," appearing in issue #29, Spring 2009. To order, visit: http://www.slipstreampress.org/ It's a pretty classic definitional list poem: x=y, x=c, x=q. For example: Blue birds are blue birds. Blue birds are birds that think they are the sky. Blue birds are feathers glued onto bone by a child who wants to shoot the sky with his bb gun. Blue birds are hot blue formica tiles cut up and soldered into something resembling flight intersecting black tarmac. Blue birds shit and fight and chase off gold finches. What I like about the formula is that the farther along you go, the more interesting your definitions get as you come up with new insights, new language, new things to say. I think I'm going to do this thing again, for real though, not for blue birds, and this time list definitions for 'grotesque' in thank...

I want to take a second to suggest to everyone that they send some work out. Since I've had some time off from working, I've been on a major rampage submitting to journals and book contests. This has led to a lot of rejection, and I'm happy to share with you, some success! Thanks to Cider Press Review , Puerto del Sol , and Gulf Coast , and Pebble Lake Review for my recent acceptances. Thanks also to the Cider Press Review Book Award for naming my manuscript, Mystery School , a finalist in their 2008 Book Prize. To read the poems, here's a link to the magazines. http://www.puertodelsol.org/current.html Look for "Trojan Horse," in Spring 2009. http://www.ciderpressreview.com/archive/volume9/index.php Look for "Love Poem," and "Museum," in Volume 10, Spring 2009. http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=2 Look for "Apocalypse," in Fall 2009. http://pebblelakereview.com/ Look for "Pescadita," in the Health and Illness is...