Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Month: May 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

Poets, Stop Blaming the Water

GordonI came across a link on a poetry group announcing the news that Salt Publishing was discontinuing its single-poet publications.  Chris Hamilton-Emery says, "We have tried to commit to single-author collections by funding them
ourselves, but as they have become increasingly unprofitable, we can't
sustain it." I agree, this is sad news when a publisher gives up selling these types of books.

Many business owners all over the world agonize over compromises they are asked to make between what they want to sell, what customers want to buy and how to bridge the gap with marketing. I responded to the poster, saying

"Poets need to market, I hate to even say the
words, outside of the box. I've been working on speaking in front of academics
in science and other fields to show the value of poetry as a part of their
overall scheme of research. We are living in such a practical-based world where
(a) people seek practical enlightenment in their free time and (b) they are
buying all their books online. Poets need to make their books appeal to this
practicality and make sure poetry books can be found via online searches. It's
a challenge but I won't give up hope…

 I've blogged about:

Using Poetry for Research
Projects
Supporting poetry-based projects on
Kickstarter
Tagging to Serve Poetry: I also feel we can help each other out but
tagging our favorite poetry books on Amazon and other online storefronts so
someone searching for a topic like PTSD or motherhood or whatever will find books of poetry on that
subject and possibly get hooked. 

 Again, traditional methods won't solve the situation."

The poster responded thusly:

"i think the situation is very complex and not
merely a matter of sales and marketing but lies at in the changing fabric of
cultural importance and the role of art in a totally commoditised environment.  The questions that need to be asked are not just
of poets or even publishers, but of educators and society as a whole."

I get a shudder down my spine reading this. This argument is basically that it's the customer's problem, not ours. You recognize it instantly if you're ever watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsay goes into a failing restaurant to try to help the owners turn things around. Invariably the owner states to Ramsay that the restaurant's problem is not their food quality, is not their decor, is not their levels of service or their menu selections.

Their ego can never take the next step of logic: you have no customers because…(your food sucks, your decor is outdated, your service is slow and your menus are uninspiring). Customers are not stupid. It just makes you feel better to believe they are.

"The questions that need to be asked are not just
of poets or even publishers, but of educators and society as a whole" 
is another way of blaming the customer. And contempt for the customer never works in turning a business around. Like…never.

And selling books, reality check, is a business. 

We must question a phrase like "the role of art in a totally commoditised environment" because both art and books are commodities…unless you give your books away for free or strap them up on a public monument. In fact, some would argue that books and poetry are part of the whole art/information/entertainment glut of trash we produce in this world. So if we could stop pretending and pretentiously sanctifying what we do for a moment, we might relate more effectively with our customers. Or at least be in a position to listen to them.

RamsayThe paradigm of publishing is transforming just like the sales of music transformed a decade ago. And it's transforming similarly  because publishers haven't been listening to their customers or serving their authors (my husband is at this moment reading a University of Oklahoma Press book full of confusing typos and grammatical errors).

The poetry biz is a long shot of long shots, especially considering even new novelists are struggling to find an audience. Actors, producers and directors are struggling to get an audience. Poets for years have been only marketing to other poets who cry poor and don't buy books of poetry. Meanwhile, in the outside world poetry has lost its moral authority and barely retains any intellectual authority. How does any business turn around a slump or a bad reputation: marketing.

It's all about marketing for everybody. And if you keep on denying reality and stubbornly adhere to the techniques that have been failing for the last 20-30 years, the same lame excuses about how society doesn't value poetry, you will sink.

I've been watching old episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show this week on DVD. Even in the first season's episodes from the early 1970s, the characters were complaining about the same things we complain about today: nobody watches the news, insurance companies are a racket, it's hard to find time for our heart's pursuits. Not much has changed in all these years. New technology just provides new ways for us to be who we already were. And even technologies are failing to better technologies. Cable TV has ignored and gouged their customers so long, Hulu is threatening them. Amazon has finally crushed the big book superstores who once crushed your small, independent, local bookstores. Nothing has changed fundamentally, including all the hand-wringing from the complainers and excuse-givers.

"They have bad taste and it's not my fault."

That's okay to believe if you want an empty restaurant.

Listen poetry peoples, you took this boat out on the bay and you've been sinking for years. Stop blaming the water.

 

May Poetry News Roundup


Boromir

General News

  • Poetry plagiarism story from Harriet blog: I always wonder why people bother to plagiarize poetry (unless it happens by accident–like confused notes in a notebook or something: Was that my thought? Or did I read that somewhere?). There's so little to gain. But apparently Brits have been plagiarizing US poets lately and winning awards! Criminy!
       
  • Poetry Magazine has joined the eBook revolution. Thank God. There have been some technical issues with publishing poetry in eBooks, problems with hanging indents and controlling the look of heavily formatted poems. I explored these issues when I formatted my book for eBook last year.  Most of the formatting issues have been resolved by some scrappy html hack/poets. I knew if I searched around, html workarounds would be available. And so they were for almost all devices except a Kindle published through Smashwords' Meatgrinder formatter (which isn't too big of a problem considering you can publish an acceptable Kindle version directly via Amazon and Smashwords is working to allow direct ePub uploads).
        
  • Publishers Weekly posts and feature about "6 Authors Who Never Quit Their Day Job." In my 2013 poverty, I'm beginning to see the benefits of this.

Allen Ginsberg News

Lord of the Rings Poetry News
So Monsieur Big Bang and I have just given up our DirectTV not being able to afford the $70 a month we pay to not even get all the basic channels. We're switching over to Hulu which is less than $10 a month for unlimited streaming. We can then watch the new Hulu original comedy Quick Draw coming out in June. It stars John Lehr, famous for playing the Geico Caveman and starring in the TBS show 10 Items or Less. John Lehr and Monsieur Big Bang are longtime friends and Monsieur Big Bang did consulting and research for this show. So check it out. It's "a comedic half-hour western set in
1875 that centers on a Harvard-educated sheriff and his quest to
introduce the emerging science of forensics to an unruly Kansas town."




Quickdraw

Anywho, Mr. Big Bang and I spent our first cable-less week watching the uncut version of The Lord of the Rings. I have two related poetry items that seem appropriate to mention now:

        

Latest Poetry Journals and Catalogs

ApI enjoyed this season's American Poet issue (from The Academy of American Poets) much more than last issue. The articles were less dense and obtuse. Carl Phillips does a great explication of Frank O'Hara's poem "To The Harbormaster." Jane Hirshfield reviews the new book Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen (who won The Walt Whitman Award). I like the poems she excerpted about grief and gun violence, especially "Trajectory" ("After spiraling twice/it exits the barrel") and "Chekhov's Gun" ("Nothing ever absolutely has to happen. The gun/doesn't have to be fired").

I usually like David Wojahn poems and the ones in here don't disappoint. Mark Doty talks about Brenda Hillman's poetry. Mark Doty never disappoints either. Edward Hirsh talks about Gary Snyder. I like his poem "As for Poets." Like the last issue, I love the Manuscript Study feature, this one focusing on May Swenson's "The Question." Wow, what a revision there.  There are some new books out that look interesting to get: The Collected Poems of Ai, Anne Carson has a new book, red doc>, and Susan Wheeler's Meme looks good. I hated the send-up gravitas of the cover when I first got it, but something about it has stuck is my paw and I keep looking at it.

AprGerald Stern is on the cover of the latest American Poetry Review. Another chance to figure him out. Another failure. His "companion" Anne Marie Macari also has a review in the issue. Anne Marie was in my class with Jean Valentine at Sarah Lawrence. I sat next to her a few times. She was newly divorced, she told me. Soon after I graduated, it was rumored she had "hooked-up" with Gerald Stern. Gossip, gossip. So it's interesting they're in this issue together. Another one of my classmates, Ross Gay (in my class with David Rivard) has poems in this issue as well. Now Ross I remember better. I had a crush on him. And that was my only crush at Sarah Lawrence. But I never got to know him. He seemed very private.

I like Jennifer Militello's poems "Corrosion Therapy" and "Criminal How-To." Kathleen Ossip does an interesting light piece on Anne Sexton. I like Charlotte Matthews' "Patron Saint of the Convenience Store" and "The End of Make Believe." There's a huge excerpt on Trobairitz (female Troubadour) poetry from around the 13th century. I felt I should have liked this more than I did. It teetered on having some feminist interest for me but I just couldn't get into it. I felt the same way about Ray Gonzalez's "Crossing New Mexico with Weldon Kees" series of poems. After all, I am in New Mexico now. I should get all the references.  What blew my socks off was the poem "Woman and Dogs" by Adam Scheffler. Like I loved it enough to pin up.Here's how it begins,

My girlfriend's dog is small and fat and neurotic
and smells at night like an African meat flower.
It loves her more than some people love anyone
in a riddle of love it worries at, lying there on the floor.

Also liked James Galvin's "Simon Says," and "Long Distance" and Kettje Kuipers' "A Beautiful Night for the Rodeo." Although I enjoyed it, I have no idea why that article on TV cars was in there, except to point out the American-ness of cars. I liked that long Christopher Buckley poem and Alex Lemon's "The Righteous Man is an Advocate of All Creatures." I felt the poems were stronger than the essays this issue.

CcrThe Spring 2013 Copper Canyon Reader also came to my mailbox this month. Merwin's book of Selected Translations seems interesting in light of all the translations we read and discussed in the Nobel Prize winning poets class I just finished.  There wasn't as much that appealed to me in this issue, which is unusual. I liked Michael McGriff's excerpt from his poem "My Family History as Explained By the South Fork of the River." I also liked Robert Bringhurst's "A Quadratic Equation" and David Wagoner's "A Brief History," an ars poetica:

without knowing what it was waiting for
in places where it didn't belong,
how it broke down, how
but not why it made marks again
and again on pieces of paper.

I'm a sucker for quote-books, so I'm sure I'll buy Dennis O'Driscoll's book Quote Poet Unquote. From the excerpts,

Poems are never made out of 100% good will and good tidings. There is always a little cold wind in a good poem. — George Szirtes

 

A Book (and My Thoughts) About Modernism

Situation1When I was at Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1990s another book poets mentioned in passing was this 1978 collection of thoughts on modernism by Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry. I bought the book with the uber-boring cover seen to the left, not the more interesting version depicted below. Since Pinsky was U.S. Poet Laureate around that time, I mistakenly thought the book was going to be about the situation of poetry at that time. What Pinsky meant was the act of situating poetry in a context.

It's been a dust-magnet on my bookshelf since 1997. I've tried to read it a few times but only succeeded in using it as a sleep aid. It's dense, akin to a post-graduate lecture. I would argue it's needlessly obtuse but then there are some out there with a taste for that sort of thing.

In any case, now that I'm too broke for new books, I've taken it upon myself to read the ones mildewing on my bookshelves. This one was, as I am fond of saying, a slog
Situation2to get through and I wouldn't recommend it. But I did learn some things reading it. Pinksy illustrates the connections between ideas in Romanticism and those in Modernism and he shows how modernism works in particular styles of writing, from persona writing to  descriptive to didactic writing. In fact, I found his last chapter on discursive poetry to be the most passionate and convincing.

I also thought he did a good job at defining Modernism as "a dissatisfaction with the abstract, discursive, and conventional nature of words as a medium for the particulars of experience." He later describes a nominalist poem* as "logically impossible. Language is absolutely abstract, a web of concepts and patterns; and if one believes experience can consist of unique, ungeneralizable moments, then the gap between language and experience is absolute. But the pursuit of the goal or the effort to make the gap seem less than absolute, has produced some of the most remarkable and moving poetry…" Later, he says, "The terms of language are too human and too grandly abstract, ever to capture the impenetrably casual, fragmented life of physical things. Close as a poet may come, his poem consists of terms, not things."

I'm torn about the whole era of Modernism and its experiments in order, language and meaning. I'm also torn about its sequel of Post-Modernism (meta-writing and irony, although I was raised on it).

On one hand, I find the conversations about language and sense-making stimulating because I romanticise intellectualism and I see this kind of discussion as pure versus applied science and therefore worthwhile. On the other hand, experiments can go on a bit too long. My grade-school age niece was recently sent to the principal's office after an incident in music class. She was made to sit through a long lecture on whole and half notes. She eventually became frustrated and cried out, "We get it!"

Along those lines, my mother came to visit last week and brought a recent USA Today article on Joyce Kilmer and his poem "Trees." The article was about how every child in American was once made to memorize Joyce Kilmer's poem. Journalist Rick Hampson argues that memorization is a beneficial way to learn the mechanisms of poetry and rhetoric. But reading the article, I froze at the first famous lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree…

But of course, words fail. The Modernist knew it. You know it. I know it. Even Kilmer knew it. Turns out a few million or so elderly Americans were forced to memorize the idea.

What I can't connect with is the emotional involvement in the limits of language. I mean as a student, I like the essay. But as a matter of religion, I don't subscribe. As soon as you cross over the line and start to worry and fret about the gap between language and experience, it can only become madness.

How do we deal with language as a flawed system?

There are two things that help me deal with broken things: ceramics and Zen Buddhism. When I took my first class in pottery making years ago, I had to learn how to think in shapes. I've spent my whole life thinking in words. This was a mind-blowing change for me and by the end of it words and the business of using words ceased to be sacrosanct for me. In fact,  I started to wonder if shapes were maybe a higher, if not equal, form of thinking about being. In any case, ceramics taught me I could be spiritually satisfied to create in a wordless world.

Zen Buddhism asks me this: what exactly is it that I dislike about imperfection, beyond the fact that the thing or system is not perfect? There's a gap, but why is that cause for anxiety? Because my attempt to communicate and be understood will be imperfect? My desire for perfection is the cause of my suffering. My desire for words to be more than they are is the cause of my suffering. I cannot change the gap. I cannot have a world of perfectly-grown uniform trees either.

But wouldn't such a thing be creepy?

Forget about the complexities of our inner lives, politics, and contemplating ultimate reality. Let's just deal with the frickin tree. If the word approximated the tree in any absolute way, what the hell would we need the tree for?

 


*Nominalism: holding that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. (Free Dictionary)

 

4 Books of International Poetry

When I was at Sarah Lawrence in the mid 1990s, everyone was all agog over international poets, especially ones who had written poems about New York, like Federico Garcia Lorca. I was still trying to catch up on all my homeboys and girls and so felt I was very far behind in all things literary.

But the truth is you are never far behind where ever you are. Each is on their own path, having reading experiences precisely when they should. It's not just about what you read, it's about how you respond to what you read.

Forget about what everyone else is reading. Better still, ignore what everyone else says you should be reading. Don't ignore quality suggestions that suit your interests; these can be very valuable and life-changing. Ignore any recommendation made in the spirit of condescension. And like Gandalf says, when you're lost just follow your nose.

VintageYears ago I made my first investment in an international anthology of poetry, The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry (1996), edited by J.D. McClatchy. I guess this is my favorite international anthology because, just like that boy in St. Louis, it was my first.

I like how the book is organized. You get a handful of poems (4-8) on a very large array of poets taken from each geographical area. You also get a half-page synopsis on each poet before you read their poems. I used this book to identify the international poets I wanted to explore further, searching for their selected works on Amazon. In some cases, only used copies were available. In other cases, their works have disappeared altogether and their books are languishing in my Amazon Wish List.

I discovered much about my taste in cultural poetries. For instance, I loved most of the Spanish/Portuguese-speaking poets, Sophia De Mello Breyner (Portugal), Eugenio De Andrade (Portugal; I was disappointed in his selected poems), Angel Gonzalez (Spain), Roberto Juarroz (Argentina) and Maria Elena Cruz Varela (Cuba). I think I liked their gritty earthiness, their almost-Catholic connections between blood and the soul, their willingness to linger over elements of the body. In totality, I didn't much like French poets (too chilly and cerebral) but I'm beginning to warm to them. I liked Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (who I'm reading now). I tended to like the Eastern European poets like Polish poets Tadeusz Rozewicz and Wisława Szymborska, Czech poet Miroslav Holub (whose selected works became one of my favorite reads this year), Serbian poet Vasko Popa, Yugoslavian poet Novica Tadic, Romanian poet Paul Celan. I didn't like any of the Russian poets.

I was mixed on Middle Eastern and African poets. I liked Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (whose book The Window I read but can't remember much about). I loved, loved, loved Taslima Nasrin (Bangladesh) and her book The Game in Reverse.  I also liked Indian poet A.K. Ramanujan.

I came to enjoy Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian poets later on in my life when I was researching Buddhist poems. But from this book I only picked out Japanese poet Ryuichi Tamura to pursue.

Overall, this anthology was good for sampling a large amount of international poets quickly.

LanguageeLanguage for a New Century, Contemporary Poetry from The Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008), edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, a book I picked up in Santa Monica years ago, is an entirely different project. The poems are organized in subject groups (childhood poems, experimental poems, political poems, etc.). I wasn't always clear about what subjects the sections represented, even if I had a vague idea. Each section begins with personal essays by each of the editors, all of which were interesting.

Although I did enjoy the poems in the book, there were some issues. The poets were not identified by country, if a poet had multiple poems represented in the anthology they were not presented together, and the poet's biographies were all listed at the end of the book. All of this made locating my favorite poets and pursuing them further a bit of a trail. But this anthology is definitely worth reading to discover some new and exciting poets. Maybe not an  international anthology choice for newbies.

WorldThe book I recently finished, The Poetry of Our World, An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2000), edited by Jeffery Paine, might be a good starter book on international poetry like the Vintage book. This book includes many helpful historical essays at the beginning of each section, putting the poets in context with world and local events. You get far fewer samples in this book versus the Vintage anthology, but the essays are helpful.

Helen Vendler does the first section on English poetry. I could have done without the inclusion of the U.S. poets who were already familiar to me. As for "international," Vendler includes Philip Larkin (England), Seamus Heaney (Ireland) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) who many English-speaking readers may also already be familiar with.

Each geographical section reviews about five poets, although many of the sections have a catch-all chapter at the end with other poets worth pursuing. Carolyn Forché edits the Latin American section.  I was already familiar with Neruda and Octavio Paz (both who I love) but I came away wanting to look more into Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), César Vallejo (Peru) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil). 

Joseph Brodsky, Sven Birkerts, and Edward Hirsch edit the European section. They were able to break me into famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I also enjoyed more of Romanian Paul Celan. I loved Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's poem "The Power of Taste."

Kwame Anthony Appiah edits the African section. This was a mixed bag for me, although I did love Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka's poem "Telephone Conversation." I'm trying to figure out what I feel about African poets. They tend to be understandably political and I wonder if something is getting lost in the translations.

For me the Asian section falls apart with too many editors and only one poet selected from each major area: India (still love A.K. Ramanujan), Middle East (one poet for its entirety!), Southeast Asia, China and Japan (liked the Shuntaro Tainkawa poems). Regardless of the dearth of poets represented by country, all the essays (by area) were very illuminating.

The poets picked here are fewer but are the most famous and established of contemporary poets in their countries.

ForcheAgainst Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness is an old standby, with over 700 pages of protest and witness. This is literally the textbook on protest and witness poetry but it can also serve as an international anthology.

It’s organized by categories of country and political atrocity: Armenian Genocide poems, World War I and II poems, Soviet Union revolution and repression poems, Spanish Civil War poems, Holocaust poems, repression in Eastern and Central Europe poems, dictatorship in the Mediterranean poems, Indio-Pakistani War poems, Middle East War poems, repression and revolution in Latin America poems, American civil rights and liberties poems, Korean and Vietnam War poems, African apartheid poems, and democracy in China poems.

So the international anthology you may want to read will depend on your personal taste for amount of poets represented (pick the Vintage book), background information (pick Poetry of our World),  quality poems from some new and undiscovered poets (pick Language for a New Century) or poetry about political persecution by country or international area (pick Against Forgetting).

 

Take the Christian Science Monitor’s Poetry Test

QuizI took this test last night. Wasn't easy. But if you've been reading poetry voraciously for decades, you'll probably do ok. I've been reading poetry voraciously only sporadically over the last 20 years so I only did so-so. If they would have thrown in a bonus question about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I would have nailed it!  (I won my Mary Tyler Moore Show Trivia Merit Badge in 1994, I'm proud to say).

Christian Science Monitor asks the question, Are You a Poetry Aficianado? And the gauntlet is thrown down!

MarymeritThis reminds me of my Name That Cher Tune test on Cher Scholar. I pick deep catalog snippets from the vaults of 40 albums and one single going back to 1964. One day a very flappable Cher fan wrote me an email (I wish I still had it) that said quite frankly, "You Bitch! This test is too f*$king hard!! Where are the new songs, bitch???" I remember telling him to calm down; if I made the quiz too easy, every sequined-loving kid out there would win it. He did calm down and we became fast Cher-friends.

Think about that when you're suddenly frustrated that you've never read any Wendell Berry (for no other reason than to have an online test validate your value as a mover and a shaker among poetry readers).

Here is the test.

 

Interesting Waite Phillips Quotes Pertaining to Writing

Dawnchandler I've spent the last 20 days with family and friends celebrating Monsieur Big Bang's graduation with his master's degree from nearby Highlands University. We took my parents up to the Cimarron area for a day. There we saw the remains of the town of Dawson, New Mexico. Dawson was a mining town important to our family because it's existence supplied the need for a railroad depot and a new town called Roy, New Mexico, where my grandparents were raised. Ironically, Roy still exists as a small town but Dawson was closed down decades ago by the railroad company that ran it. You can visit the cemetery and the memorial to the miners who lost their lives in some horrific mining accidents there.

We also visited Philmont Boyscout Ranch, where Monsieur Big Bang did his field work last summer. We visited the area where he camped (which is near the house of Gretchen Sammis, a very interesting woman rancher who was heir to the Chase Ranch) and toured the Waite Phillips house at Philmont. Oil entrepreneur Waite Phillips donated much of his New Mexico property to the Boy Scouts in the 1950s.I bought a little commemorative book of his epigrams from the gift shop. He had some good things pertaining to the writing life:

– If you want to be a singer, start to sing. (Elsie Robinson)
– A man is generally what he thinks about all day long. (Emerson)
– The man who never makes mistakes never makes much of anything. (Waite Phillips)
-  What is really important is what you learn after thinking you know it all. (Waite Phillips)
-  The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting. (Christopher Morley)
-  'Tis not in mortals to command success but we'll do more Sempronius–we'll deserve it. (Shakespeare)
-  Those incapable of building seek to attract attention by tearing down. (Channing Pollock)
-  The trouble with many of us is that we would rather be ruined by flattery and praise than saved by honest criticism. (Waite Phillips)
– One of the most surprising compensations of life is that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. (J. Pearson Webster)
– If we keep on going, the chances are we will stumble onto something but I never heard of anyone stumbling while sitting down. (Chas. F. Kettering)
– Regardless of ability, no one individual can accomplish and complete anything worthwhile without direct or indirect cooperation from others. (Waite Phillips)
– To hate is to hurt–not the hated but the hater. Fortunately I have learned by experience to reduce the hate factor to that of simple disapproval. (Waite Phillips)
-  An ancient Persian proverb states, "The dogs bark but the caravan passes on." So does modern man when subjected to unjust or petty criticism. (Waite Phillips)
– It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. (Walt Whitman)
-  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcomings….who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt)

And quoted in its entirety is this Rudyard Kipling poem, "If."

Artist Dawn Chandler does some amazing Philmont Boyscout Ranch paintings (see above). She's an alumni counselor of the Philmont Boyscout Ranch and I met her in one of Barbara Rockman's Santa Fe poetry workshops last year. Visit her website at: http://www.taosdawn.com/LandPhilmont01.html

Interesting note: I found out that girls can now join the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch summer treks through their co-ed Venturing programs. Although I'm skeptical of the recent decision by the Boy Scouts regarding gay counselors, I wish I would have had Adventuring programs when I was a kid. Girl Scouts never did anything too adventuresome and I dropped out after one year. Maybe they should have invented FagHag Scout Camp for me. I would have fit in well there, too: hiking treks by day, glitter crafts by firelight.

 

Comment on My Poem on a Virtual Poetry Circle

PoetrySavvy Verse & Wit was very kind to choose "Starbaby," one of the poems from Why Photographers Commit Suicide, for their 200th Virtual Poetry Circle.

 Please check it out and leave some comments!
http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/05/200th-virtual-poetry-circle.html

I've also been meaning to complete the National Poetry Month blog circle on Savvy Verse & Wit. Here are my favorites from the second half of the month:

To see the full list, visit the tour's homepage.

Here are my favorites from the beginning of the blog tour.

 

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