Alas, the timetable has us delivering final issue copy to John for the issue on March 19th. Therefore, I am in full swing moderating the panel discussion on the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, reading the Tom Mathews book I intend to review, and planning my editorial WHILE desperately coding a redesigned Barefoot Muse, for which the new issue goes live on March 1st.

I think I’d better think it out again!

On the positive front, I’ve had a recent acceptance from Light Quarterly, and you can see several new poems up at Chanterelle’s Notebook. This Sunday coming is also the delayed start of my formal workshop poetry series at the Manayunk Art Center in Philadelphia. It will run from 12-3 and we will be covering all the material from the snow-cancelled first workshop (Blank Verse) and making a start on Rhyme. There are still spots available so you can turn up on spec and pay your $15, or email me and let me know you are planning to attend. (FYI the other 2 workshops are scheduled for March 14th and April 18th.)

Hopefully there will be a Quick & Dirty Poetry reading tomorrow night at The Daily Grind in Mt. Holly. The snow doesn’t look too bad out there right now, but one of our featured readers (Laurie Granieri) is driving from New Brunswick. Oh well, spring must be here soon!

While we are on the subject, my good friend Rachel Bunting also scored with Dzanc, gaining selection for her poem “Martha Stewart Claims She Has Been Struck By Lightning Three Times” (which deserves inclusion simply for the title!)

The formal poetry event at the MAC was a blast last Sunday! It was so gratifying to be with a bunch of poets who care as deeply about formal/metrical poetry as I do. There was plenty of surprising synergy too–Kit Marlowe, Walter Raleigh and even “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley (I had watched the excellent movie the night before).

I am proud to report that I am now ready to teach the first formal/metrical poetry workshop of the MAC series, which starts this Sunday at 12 p.m. (Weather permitting). Is a 6 page-handout too much? I just want to make certain my participants get value for money! There’s still time to register by the way. And you can find the online version of the registration form here. Either print it out and mail it to the MAC, or email it to myself or Peter Krok.

Finally, I need to make a serious point that I have made before in these pages. Quincy and I are getting close to filling the poetry requirement for Vol 9 Issue 1 of The Raintown Review (due out at the beginning of June). As usual he has supplied me with a breakdown of the poets’ demographics, and as usual we are disappointingly male heavy–about 2:1. Being the premier female editor of a predominantly formal poetry print journal (Um…that sounds like I’m boasting, which is not my intent) clearly this frustrates me immensely. But, there is NOTHING I can do as long as we receive approximately twice as many submissions from men as from women. In the past, I have made open calls here on my blog for more submissions from women, and been accused of reverse sexism as a result. I am not going to do that now–I’m just sayin’…

(The submissions guidelines are here.)

The first program is entitled “Formal Poetry is Alive & Well” and begins with me presenting a short talk on Philip Larkin & Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not seeing a connection apart from the obvious? Come hear the talk…! After that local formalists will read poems in the spirit of the event–either their own work or poems they admire. There will also be an Open Mic.

The event will be the perfect springboard for the series of formal poetry workshops that will follow throughout the spring. Sign up for a single workshop or all 4:

•    Workshop 1 – BASIC METER & BLANK VERSE – Sunday February 7th 12-2 p.m.
If you have ever shaken your head and claimed you can’t “hear meter” here is your opportunity to acquire this basic poetic skill

•    Workshop 2- RHYME & HOW NOT TO FORCE IT – Sunday February 28th 12-2 p.m.
Rhyme made subtle, slant rhyme, assonance, consonance, and tricks of the trade.

•    Workshop 3 – INTRODUCTION TO FORMS  – Sunday March 14th 12-2 p.m.
The villainous villanelle, the seductive sestina, the tricky little triolet and more…

•    Workshop 4 – THE SONNET – Sunday April 18th 12-2 p.m.
Your chance to create one of these classic 14-lined poetic jewels!

Registration forms will be available at Sunday’s event or online here. (Simply mail to Peter Krok, care of Manayunk Art Center, at the address given.)

I am very excited to have this opportunity, because it has long been a dream of mine to teach the craft of formal poetry to a willing audience. Hope to see you there!

The truth is that if I were, as I was in the beginning, merely taking a half hour weekly class, combined with a half hour’s practice time, I could pass this off as a laudable effort not to stagnate in my forties, but instead to challenge myself and learn a new skill. However, if I add in the other half hour class I take as a pair with my new ice dance partner Jim, and then confess that I visit the ice on two additional occasions to make a total of five and a half hours ice time a week, you might look at me as though I were teetering on the edge of insanity. What about the poems going unwritten, the editorial decisions unmade, the websites un-updated, the children (gasp!) uncared for?

Of course I am still trying to do all those things TOO, along with at least two step classes and one chisel class per week. (I HAVE given up Boxing…) And things do get done…eventually.

But why? Who cares that I can now skate competently forward and backward, with crossovers in both directions; that I can do three turns on three of the four forward edges and a passable waltz jump; that Jim and I can Dutch Waltz and Rhythm & Blues?

Here’s the thing: it makes me happy, in a way that Poetry–sometimes quite spectacularly–fails to do. Don’t get me wrong, here–I still feel that exultation of spirit WHILE I am writing a new poem, and that visceral satisfaction when it is finished. And of course an acceptance sends me into a delirium of delight.

But skating, skating doesn’t just make me happy when I’m doing it, or when someone comes up to me and tells me how amazed they are at my progress. Skating improves the quality of my life.

How? Well, firstly my stress levels are lower–I can’t believe how calmly I negotiated the Holidays despite the major hurdle of a visit to England. I guess this is positive endorphins from exercise or something? Secondly I’m sleeping better–yes, this is because I am physically exhausted, especially on Mondays and Wednesdays (Step Class, 1 1/2 hours skating, 1 or 2 dog walks)–but having been a poor sleeper for some 2 decades now, this is a precious gift indeed. Finally, I’ve only gone and lost about five bloody pounds!

Not that I was exactly overweight, you understand, but there’s always been this nagging voice in my head that says something like “You’d look better if you lost a little weight; you’re getting older–no point in being fat with it.” However, I’ve been wary of dieting ever since a bout of bulimia in my early twenties. Plus any diet I tried to follow would almost certainly need me to give up wine, which is kind of a non-starter as ideas go. So here I am, about four months into a non-diet/ new exercise regime, and I’ve lost over a pound a month! I’m fitting into clothes I haven’t worn for a while, and feeling good about how I look in a bikini!

And when was the last time Poetry helped with any of that?

And what a stonking good issue it is, from the striking cover photograph by Katy Maslow to the stalwart list of contributors on the back. Also poems by Ned Balbo, Paul Bone, Greg Alan Brownderville, Michael Cantor, Jehanne Dubrow, Maureen Gallagher, Kevin Higgins, Rose Kelleher, Rick Mullin, Timothy Murphy, Aaron Poochigian, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and others. We have incisive book reviews by Nick Friedman, Fintan O’Higgins, and Aifric Mac Aodha. In my editorial I survey the general run of metrical poetry-oriented magazines (we come out looking well, strangely enough), while Associate Editor Quincy R. Lehr is on a tear about something or other in an essay entitled “Down with ‘Good Poetry!’” (Just read it; the title makes sense in context.) In short, you are going to love it! (Contributors and subscribers should start receiving copies within a week or so.)

Speaking of which, if you haven’t yet, or haven’t recently, think about subscribing. Yes, I know that there are a gazillion magazines out there asking for your hard-earned cash. But The Raintown Review is “essential reading for the formal poetry community” or so it says in my essay…

And that might mean YOU!

There’s a busy week of poetry ahead! The QNDs are meeting on Wednesday to discuss the latest batch of submissions for Up & Under. On Thursday it’s the Awards Ceremony for the Medford Arts Center Poetry Contest I judged for the second time this year, and on Friday the QNDs are hosting a reading at The Daily Grind featuring Linda Arntzenius and Nancy Scott.

Meanwhile I am supposed to be working on the Schuylkill Valley Journal website, and starting to think more seriously about the proposed panel for the Spring 2010 issue of The Raintown Review. Speaking of TRR, the draft pdf of the Fall issue should be hitting my desk any time now. Best get back to work and clear some room for it!

Unfortunately I am coming to the conclusion that Twitter is not ready for #poetry in any serious interpretation of the word. If you search #poetry then most of what you get is bad haiku–it clearly has not been lost on the twittosphere that you can usually fit a haiku into 140 characters. Not many people, it seems, are tweeting poetry like good Marketing 2.0 citizens. (The exception would be the chat #poettues arranged by @robertleebrewer, but that only really happens on Tuesdays, as the name would suggest.)

I see Twitter being incredibly useful to my fellow panelists @donlafferty and @centsiblelife, and I want to make it work for #poetry as well, so, come on, any ideas?

My online dictionary defines it as “the juxtaposition of clauses or phrases without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions, as It was cold; the snows came.” However, I first met the term in an essay on reading difficulty by Hannah Brooks-Motl in the Summer 2008 issue of The Dark Horse. Brooks-Motl adds this definition: “In poetry, parataxis can also mean the juxtaposition of dissimilar fragments or images, and it can entail the purposeful omission of a clear connection or link between parts.”

I liked this definition because it seemed to me an elegant way of describing that poetry which occupies the middle ground between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E  poetry–in which the unit of dysfunction may well be as small as the word, the syllable, or even the letter–and free verse poetry written with sequential logic (which I would like to dub “non-paratactic free verse”).

Here’s the first stanza of Alicia Ostriker’s “Cancer,” a clear example of non-paratactic free verse, taken from the current American Poetry Review:

My friend whose husband
will soon succumb to cancer
loves to lie next to him at night

And, from the same magazine, here are the first few lines of Joshua Beckman’s second poem:

Tinsel’s cold stove, first like
rotten sex and then like a drop
of nothing that creates a fog
before your eyes.

This seems to me to display parataxis. Of course, definitions in poetry are rarely zero-sum. Paratactic poetry may occupy space on the spectrum between poetry that shows sequential logic and Langpo, but they all segue seamlessly into each other. The Beckman example makes syntactic sense–one can even posit meanings for what is being implied–but it is not employing the straightforward technique of the Ostriker poem.

Nor are any of these kinds of poetry to be disparaged–each has its raison d’etre. My purpose in establishing the phrase “non-paratactic free verse” is simply to describe the kind of free verse printed by most journals that actively publish formal poetry. In other words, it would be rare to see a paratactic poem next to a sonnet in, say, The Hudson Review.

In The Raintown Review, on the other hand, I’m hoping you wouldn’t be too surprised to find a paratactic sonnet.

I initially thought the speed dating was going to be a bust, because only one person had signed up to see me, and ditto for my good friend Rachel Bunting, but in the end I got a couple of latecomers in addition. Rachel gave the two of them double value by chipping in.

This afternoon I went to a couple of panels while I was waiting for my own to come up. Then I was on the panel for Marketing 2.0, Promoting Your Work in a Web 2.0 World. We had a great discussion! Here’s a shout out to my fellow panelists: Don Lafferty of the Philadelphia Liars Club, Kelly Whelan, who blogs at The Centsible Life, and Children’s Book author Nancy Viau.

When I got back my contributor copies of Measure had arrived, and I was thrilled to discover my name was actually on the cover of the journal. Previously I have always been billed as “And Other Poets” so this was a real milestone. Sweet!

I went to the Doctor’s for my annual check up this morning, and I bristled when the receptionist asked me if I was unemployed or a housewife. I wanted to say “Neither!” Hey, I am the head of a publishing empire, here! (And ask my husband how much housewifery he’s ever seen me engaged in!) But of course I didn’t.

Seriously, I’d rather cop to the description “Mother” than “Housewife.” Mothering is a part of my life that I try not to skimp on. This school year I have to collect Becky from school at 2.50 p.m. four days a week in order to have her at Gymnastics Practice at 3.30. (Note: I probably could not do this if I were “Employed.”) On Mondays I pick her up, then drive to Bordentown to collect her friend and team-mate, Abby, at 3.15 p.m. and get them BOTH to the gym for around 3.40 p.m. (Note: Abby’s Mom and my good friend, who is a single parent, IS necessarily employed.) Lorna is also feeling a little overwhelmed by fifth grade right now, and requires lots of attention in the morning and handholding over homework. Yesterday I didn’t get her to school until 10 a.m. after another late night doing homework. This evening I am planning to sit with her until it’s done (after I get back from dropping Becky, of course) and aim to get her in bed by 9 p.m.

Why am I so cranky? I don’t know. I think I should go and get a cup of tea.