Edited: I’ve blacked out all my other sites:

Blogworld
tongues of the ocean
Shakespeare in Paradise

I’ve not blacked out this site because I wanted to share this video. But don’t be fooled. I’m entirely on board.

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

via Paris Review – Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler.

via Featherless Biped, PFFA.

To balance our emphasis on nonfiction in this issue, we have new poems from Fred D’Aguiar, Kemar Cummings, Nicolette Bethel, Yannick Giovanni Marshall, and dub poet Malachi Smith with an audio sample of Smith performing “Papine”. We are also happy to announce in this issue the winners of the 2011 Small Axe Literary Competition:

via Discussions » Blog Archive » sx salon, issue 7 December 2011.

 

I’m also working, with Sonia Farmer and Nic Sebastian, on a nanopress project. We’re calling it Lent/Elegies, and it’ll be ready to go soon. But more on that later.

They’re collected here, and mentioned here, together with the most squeamy photograph.

But read the whole issue: you won’t be sorry.

Andre Marsden, “Kevin” (catch a fire)

Chike Pilgrim, “Drought”

Paula Obè, “The Space that We Name” (spoken word)

Shivanee Ramlochan, “Good Names for Three Children”

Here are this week’s poems:

Autumn Moving in from the Coast – Wendy Howe (USA)

Winter Poinciana - Nancy Anne Miller (Bermuda)

Here’s the link to the rest.

It’s Lent, and my mother died barely two months ago, and her brother died eight days before her. I didn’t give up anything else for Lent, but vowed to write a poem a day. A sevenling a day, to be exact.

As Lent started in March and Easter comes in April, this meant that some of the discipline would cross over into NaPoWriMo, when I usually commit to the poem-a-day business.

I must admit I missed a week at the end of March, and will have to catch up. But the goal for Lent is forty sevenlings to lay the foundation for one long elegy. Taking inspiration, not surprisingly, from Tennyson’s In Memoriam; similar, but not the same.

So: March

This time last year she was fine. Or seemed fine, though the cancer that would kill her was quite probably growing quite happily and quietly inside. This time last year she decided for the first time in years not to attend the annual Thinking Day Service because she was tired. She wasn’t diagnosed till June, and she died one week ago.

*moment of silence*

Some little things:

My chapbook, Mama Lily and the Dead, was published in December.

The Avatar Review accepted four of my poems for publication in this year’s issue.

More stuff? Nothing really comes to mind. Death has a way of shutting out all the frivolous. Not entirely a bad thing, IMO.

She died last week, on February 15th.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll resume my blogging schedule; but I can’t say that it will be the same as it was before. We shall have to see what will be.

Cheers.