Craig Arnold is Missing

If you're learning about this for the first time, catch up:

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/04/find-craig-arnold-facebook-group.html

There's also a facebook group with a lot of information and updates on the status of the search for Craig Arnold.

Crossed fingers, hopes.

Prayers.

What day is it?

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

Head to Tattoosday, where I'm showing some skin.  

Now Reading Full-Length Submissions

The reading period is open.  

Cooper Dillon is an independent poetry press founded on promoting and maintaining the values which make poetry a high art.  Through the publication and distribution of full-length collections and chapbooks, our intention is to nurture the poet and reader who finds joy in aesthetic, beauty, honesty and intimacy. 

Guidelines can be found at  Cooper Dillon.com.

Tuesday, the 14th

First, for the month of April, Bill of Tattoosday is featuring writer's tats.  Check it out!  If you back track to the 4/1, you'll see Jill Essbaum's feet.  

Moving on, do you know Le Pink Elephant?  Here's their call for submission for their new journal, A Trunk of Delirium:

A Trunk of Delirium is a new bi-annual publication of literary and artistic works seeking the finest available from both established and as yet known creators. A subsidiary of Le’ Pink Elephant Press, we open the lid to accept poetry, prose, flash fiction, reviews, interviews, translations, essays, plays, and artworks of all printable forms. Submissions are now giddily accepted at atrunkofdelirium@yahoo.com.
Editors: Suzanne Savickas & Cheryl Townsend
Publication will be in both web space and print, the later being perfect bound and truly a delight to behold.
Subscriptions $15.00

MISSION STATEMENT
A Trunk of Delirium seeks to hold the diverse expressions of today’s most memorable creators, preserving such evoking delights for future consumption of the masses. By offering up its collectives in both web and print spaces, it is intended to make available more avenues to delight in the pulse of our present, yet ever changing, artistic scene of delirious exudence. Let creative liberty prevail!

Now, you probably want a poem for this day.  From Nin Andrews little book,  Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press, 2008):

Dear Professor, 

I heard you complaining

about our class.

A huge class, you said.

No one is learning a darn thing.

Consider Newton's 

2nd and 3rd laws.

We have a lot of mass.

The more you push us, 

the more we push right back.  

The Twelfth Day

I'm heading to the beach to sit around in the sun for Easter.  Then I'll enjoy something with ham.

From Zachery Schomburg's The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007): 

Experiment in Invisibility

Today I held two bananas

over each of my shoulders

and presented myself

as a quotation.

I've been a cry for help mostly,

sometimes a joke.

When you stirred from 

your sleep you wanted breakfast

but I was too late.

I had become the urgent

prayers of a desperate pilot.

I had become a marriage

proposal blown by a strong arctic

wind across Lake Ontario.

Day 11

First, some thoughts from Jason Schneiderman--excellent poet, intelligent reader of comics.  

And now:

From Christina Davis's Forth A Raven, from Alice James Books:

The Humanities

Tomorrow the man comes

to school me in the Fire.

You can lead a whole life surrounded by firemakers

and the putters out of fire

and think you have built a fire, and not have.

If the taming of blazes was the making of man,

I will have been a beast

until that hour when the man and I kneel down

with the tinder.

Also, no one has taught me how to die.

It is not listed

among the disciplines.  

Day 10

Sandra Simonds was so encouraging, and doesn't want me to stop posting poem in April.  So here's a little something from her Warsaw Bikini from Bloof Books, one of my favorite presses in the whole wide world.

Parable That Takes Place in Little Nathaniel's Closet

Just when you throw up

your hands

and say "I'm really a horrible

person," there's an-

other selfsame self that

assures you you are in-

deed more horrible

than previously suspected.

How dis-

proportionate!

It follows, then, that hidden

in this haunted mansion

a nuisance ghost

dressed up as grandpapa

pecks out your sleep and just

when you recognize that it's you

this you has re-

ceded into the cedar splintered

closet of the flesh saying--

"you see you're worse than me."

No Dice

I don't feel like posting a poem today.

Wrapped up in reading the Gandhi's autobiography.  It's wonderful.

Instead, today, you get some music:

Coyote Eyes.  Give a listen...because Manny loves you, too.

Day 8, from the Dead-guys shelf

A little William Carlos Williams for your funky soul.

Fine Work with Pitch and Copper

Now they are resting

in the fleckless light

separately in unison

like the sacks

of sifted stone stacked

regularly by twos

about the flat roof

ready after lunch

to be opened and strewn

The copper in eight

foot strips has been 

beaten lengthwise

down the center at right

angles and lies ready

to edge the coping

One still chewing

picks up a copper strip

and runs his eye along it

Day 7

From Wendell Berry's 1964 collection The Broken Ground:

The Plan

My old friend, the owner

of a new boat, stops by

to ask me to fish with him,

and I say I will--both of us

knowing that we may never

get around to it, it may be

years before we're both

idle again on the same day.

But we make a plan, anyhow,

in honor of friendship

and the fine spring weather

and the new boat

and our sudden thought

of the water shining

under the morning fog.

Day 6

From Ravi Shankar's Instrumentality, from Cherry Grove Collections, 2004:

Union

The clearing in the hills entreats

Empty rapture, shepherding hours'

Stray flocks until nothing bleats

Under the skies; insures the dower

Left for us will never cease to remain

Itself if only we proceed by twos

Into duration--spiky vervain

Is ubiquitous regard malentendu,

Our home's away, the sun's ablaze,

The way you hold up the spheres

Forms a love opaque to paraphrase

But I'll try: we've abolished fear.  

Day of Rest

No poem for today.  Rather, I'm going to go find a book stand so it's easier for me to post one up tomorrow.  

Instead, I'm gonna slip this little bit over to you:

That's Cooper Dillon Books' logo.  

From SD with love.

NaPoMo Day 4

I hope you're digging my selections so far.  It's giving me a chance to go through some books I haven't tackled in while.  For Saturday, here's a piece from Maurice Manning' s Bucolics.

XXXVIII

I'm happy Boss happy as a bird

hopping on a branch just a little branch

on one of your little trees that's all

it takes for me to wage no deeds

just the day-in day-out same old thing

it's okay by me you keep the sun

on it's string that's all I need that's

enough for me but also water O

every breath I draw I make

a little picture Boss a little bird

with a whistle in its bones hopping

on a branch like there's no tomorrow

no end in sight you might even say 

every day is like the day before

National Poetry Month, Day 3

From the Yale Young Poets Award Winning Shells, by Craig Arnold:

Artichoke

Baffling flower, barely edible,

camouflaged in a GI's olive drab

--out loud you wonder Who's it trying to fool?

It is a nymph that some god tries to grab

and have his way with, I explain.  She scorns

his lust, and when he sees he's met his match, 

he turns her into a flower, covered with thorns

to keep her other lovers out of reach.

You say You made that up.  You say That's sick.

You say The things men think of are so cruel.

Under the bamboo steamer there's a slick

of emerald-green water. I watch you pull

the petals off, each with a warm knot

of paler flesh left hanging at the root.

A "loves me, loves me not" sort of endeavor,

I say , but you don't laugh. It hasn't been

so long since liking me for being clever

stopped being enough for you.  Sly pangolin,

endearingly nearsighted, belly rolled

up in a spiky ball--that's how I keep 

my wits about me.  I notice how you'll polled

the petal-points an inch, how you scrape

each leaf with your incisors, the two

small grooves they leave.  It makes me sick to watch.

You're awfully quiet today.  What's wrong with you?

I want to tell you what...but there's a catch,

deep in my throat, that stops me, makes me choke

the words back, crack another pointless joke.

A poem for your Thursday

From Anthony Piccione's The Guests at the Gate, from BOA.

Local Writer

It's a good stubbly face, tightening with pain.

He's sprawled over the chair, older than I am,

and seems always to know things oddly,

from the back woods farm he grew up on,

down quarry country, he tells me.

He turns away, blowing his nose.

Anything leaves tracks leaves a story,

he says sideways, opening the handkerchief.

See? Woodstove needs cleaned soon.

Cigarettes'll kill you long before you quit,

and there's way too much dust on those beams.

Jabbing at the bright flecks and fibers

spread out in his hand like alphabets,

he looks at me, suddenly grinning.

Imagination is just a remembering,

from the other side, of course.

National Poetry Month, Welcome

It's April 1st, so it's National Poetry Month, and NaPoWriMo.  Festivities for the latter can be found all over the place, and particularly with the Bloofs, Reb's posse, and at Ada Limon's.  These are the places to be for daily poetry goodness.

I'm afraid I can't be counted on for these demands.  But my notebook is just about outta clean pages, so on today's agenda is picking up the cheapest notebook I can find where the binding is across the top.  That's the way we like it--also need one of those book stands for the desk so I can have books open without destroying binding.

 But just because I won't be writing a poem a day and posting it doesn't mean I'm not trying.  I'm gonna attempt to give you a poem a day by someone else.

I'm also going to go through the full notebook, and see what's what.  

I've also got a bunch of other projects that you'll hear about shortly.  

Let's do the damn thing: 

from Nick Flynn's Some Ether, 

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Children under, say , ten, shouldn't know

that the universe is ever-expanding, 

inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it

acted out in silence.  At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock

only he can pass through it.

Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock.  Ten-year-olds

should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,

ships going down--earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes.  You can run

back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come

with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved.  A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,

& drives across a city of sand.  She knows

the exact spot will skid at which point

the bridge will give, who will swim to safety

& who will be pulled under by the sharks.  She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff

he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.