It never pains but it roars...

... or something like that anyway. Four acceptances in less than 36 hours. It's rather Twilight Zone to me.

• Thieves Jargon said aye to my poem, Fishing dead bodies in water. You gotta love this 'zine — beautiful layout and the poems are 100% weird meat (my cuppa blood). The current cartoon is a riot, too. Even though it's quite self-explanatory, the Italian caption adds so much more Paf! to the whole thing: "Premetto che non mi ha fatto male ma mi ha incuriosito" = "Before anything, I have to say that I wasn't hurt, just intrigued." I thought initially that the editor was referring in some way to that when he wrote that my poems intrigued him pleasantly. He admitted not knowing Italian and I seriously doubt my stuff could ever pack such a kick.

     Submission date: 8 May 2007
     Reply date: 29 May 2007

• After some negotiation, Smiths Knoll has accepted my poem, And Why Shouldn't I Cry Over Seinfeld? for their Autumn 2007 issue (#41)... which means I get another one-year subscription — which is the whole point I've been pestering them for one whole year and taking the rejections like a donkey. My multiple selves are going wheeee!

They've got a quick turnaround rate, too. A fortnight tops. After years of sending them work, I confirm this with zeal.

     Submission date: 7 May 2007
     Reply date: 18 May 2007
     Confirmation e-mail: 30 May 2007

• Tipton Poetry Journal has accepted my poem, Heritage and the Gorilla Suit for their Summer 2007 issue (#6). I really enjoyed my print copy of the 'zine and thought I'd try with them again. Hope to see a lot of fellow bloggers in this issue!

     Submission date: 27 May 2007
     Reply date: 30 May 2007

• And last but not the least, I sent some photos to Siren on a gamble and... wooohooo! They'll be using some in their 5th issue (due out in September 2007). Am quite electrified!

To top it all —

as Agatha Christie said: "I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine."
Which means I've finished my 7th round in 30:30 today.
Won't bother posting the whole list of poems... just the idea makes my eyes drop dead. Will go for another round on June 1st, but for now I'm putting up my feet. Maybe. The husband has just offered me a data-entry job to do tomorrow, saying: "Darling, it's so boring that I know you're going to love it." How can I refuse?

In Posse Review and 10 Ars Poetica quotes

Wheeeeee!! Issue 23 of In Posse Review is now online with body poems by Kelli Russell Agodon, Kevin Minh Allen, Ivy Alvarez, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Brendan Babish, Stephanie Berger, Edward Byrne, Jeff Crandall, Jehanne Dubrow, Justin Evans, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Bob Guter, Kathryn Hunt, Donald Illich, Wayne Johns, Collin Kelley, Jared Leising, James Lineberger, Michael Lynch, CR Manley, Gary L. McDowell, Amy NewmanMartha Silano, Sarah Sloat, David Trame, Gary Winans and the AA battery. Quite excited to see a lot of familiar names on the roster and just plain delighted to be part of this issue — it's simply exquisite.

10 Ars Poetica quotes tag:

Kate tagged me into listing 10 favorite quotes pertaining to poetry and the writing of it. These ones, I find, reflect my experience —

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
             — Nadine Gordimer

                         • • • • • •

I am trying to invent a new way of moving under my dress....
             — C.D. Wright, "Crescent" (from Tremble)

                         • • • • • •

Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
             — Dylan Thomas

                         • • • • • •

I want many hands, hands that have come and gone,
hands that no longer exist except in cutting short a life line.

I would like to say I just want one hand — to name it my own.

But it's so dark in this doorway and so full of infinity.

             — Ada Limon, "Thirteen Feral Cats" (from Lucky Wreck)

                         • • • • • •

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.
             — James Joyce, in a letter (5 September 1918)

                         • • • • • •

Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes you're not trying hard enough.
             — Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

                         • • • • • •

Writing is a lot like sex. At first you do it because you like it. Then you find yourself doing it with a few close friends and people you like. But if you're any good at all... you end up doing it for money.
             — Anonymous, from the internet

                         • • • • • •

I must hurry or I will lose these poems.
Why did I make such a mess of my life?

I am Robinson Crusoe saving things
From the wreck,

Except there isn't any wreck
Nor any island,

Only my unhappiness with all the words
That have to do with 'thinking'.

             — Robert Rehder, "The Symphony" (from The Compromises Will Be Different)

                         • • • • • •

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
             — Irwin Shaw, The Paris Review (1979)

And last, probably nonsensical, but which tickles the hell out of me is:

Some men love ruled paper, because they can write athwart the lines, and some take the fly-leaves of their friends' books. But whosoever writes on cheap sermon paper full of hairs should write far away from the woman he loves....
             — H.G. Wells, Certain Personal Matters

I'm tagging Old Nick, Sharon, Ivy, Rachel and Jude.

The unofficial Press 1 mascot and ANON

On behalf of the Press 1 staff, I want to thank everyone for their great support (and wooooohooooo, button pressing). We're quite thrilled that a lot of people have taken a healthy liking to it. Mwuaaaaaaaah!

To encourage more button pressing, I have crowned the niece as Press 1's unofficial mascot. Giggle garbanzo diet. She, too likes pressing buttons — irrelevantly whether you say not that or don't.

Recent acceptance:

ANON accepted two poems, Where the hourglass and My Real Intention Was To Take The Bucket for an upcoming issue.

Absolutely delighted over this — ANON is such a classy print journal teeming with great poetry (with a preference for the surreal and dark). Really love their anonymous submission protocol, too.

Rather longish response times, but I think it's worth it —

     Submission posted: 29 January 2007
     E-mail reply: 22 May 2007

Recent publication:

Just when I was wondering if it was going to push through, I received my copy of Obsessed with Pipework (Issue 38, Spring 2007). Really thrilled with it! The poems make my mental hamster go round and round — wonderful mixture of minimalist stuff, narratives and the weirdly convoluted.

Old copies may be read online at the Poetry Library.

Their response time is something like 3 weeks via e-mail. Based on my record (1), time between acceptance and publication is one year and two months. That surprised me as well. Time flies and all that and I never noticed. In the meantime, the niece has learned to pronounce shark and my hair hasn't stopped growing.

And now that I've put my hair in the spotlight —

Thanks to Ivy, here's what it would love to wake up to in the morning. Or even this.

Press 1 launch and Rattle poem

Am pleased to announce that the first issue of Press 1 is now up — featuring the fantabulous photography of Marisa Dorna-Livet and the mind-blowing poetry/prose of Lydia Cortes, Carol Frith, Stephanie Gray, Bill Kushner, Maurice Oliver, Sean Lovelace, Allan Peterson and Lewis Warsh.

Have to add that I'm particularly proud of the way I got fancy with the Press 1 menu. Probably because it took quite a bit of head-on-the-keyboard banging. It's fancier when you use Explorer (which I —erm— don't). Some DHTML scripts don't work for Firefox. Boo.

And yes, feel free to press that button all you want. Valerie's idea. She mentioned that looking at the button and not being able to press it left her with that dissatisfied sensation of the third kind. Teehee.

We're now accepting submissions for the next issue. Valerie and the others will be the ones reading and making most of the decisions — so, don't be shy.

My first driving poem —

is now up in Rattle 26 online: A Driving Student Adjusts the Seat.

Now that we talk of driving. It seems that some new Italian law actually forbids A to drive her husband's BMW. Something to do with horsepower and A being a newbie driver. This is her excuse, anyway. A would rather dig her own grave with a ratty spoon than drive ever again.

A on cloud 9 on a Saturday morning:

Why? Because she has fulfilled one of her lifetime wants: A was allowed to paint walls with rollers. A now plans to convince the sis-in-law to make her paint the niece's room during her next stay in Manila.

Writers' Website Links and GH O TI

Just rushing this out. Am sooooooooooo way behind everything.
But I did say I'd pass that word along about —

Writers' Website Links:

Dee Rimbaud is putting together a comprehensive list of writers' websites. If you have a website, all you have to do is email him the URL plus a JPEG photograph of yourself (preferably no bigger than 200kb). His e-mail is dee.rimbaud at googlemail dot com.

If you don't know how to do this, or don't have a friend who could help you the alternative would be to send him one by regular mail to: Dee Rimbaud, c/o Fligel, 35 Falkland Street (Flat 0/1), Glasgow, G12 9QZ, Scotland, United Kingdom. (NB: only send a disposable photograph as he won't be able to return it).

GH O TI acceptance and review:

GH O TI accepted three poems for their Summer 2007 issue:

• A Driving Instructor's First Copy of Jane Eyre
• Portrait of What's-Her-Name's Husband as Loose Change
• A Daughter Named Cialis

      Submission date: 26 February 2007
      Acceptance date: 16 May 2007

A kind review by Jillian Bledsoe of my book is also up in the current issue (#10).

Day 11 of Round VII

Day 11. More than once I wanted to stop, but didn't. An extra back-pat for that.

    Poems to date —

    1. What Happens Next
    2. Fly
    3. The Lazarus
    4. Wet Paint
    5. Ferguson in the Bookshop, Sweating
    6. Ferguson's Sunday
    7. one : placebo
    8. two : union
    9. three : eclipse
    10. four : totem
    11. Letter from Miss de Bourgh

What else A has been up to:

• Setting up a new 'zine, Press 1 together with Valerie and other people

• Preparing book manuscript — tentatively titled, On Mirrors, Fractured — for submission

• Falling asleep in front of the laptop and being rudely awakened by the fire alarm when some Sim sets the kitchen on fire or when lightning strikes a tree during a sim-storm

• Growing light years further away from her mail

• Getting insensibly lost in Venice twice in less than two weeks

To cherry-top everything, A had coffee and lunch with Ellaraine Lockie — she was so excited by the tons of things they had in common, namely: paper-making, having relatives in the Philippines, a belief herbal medicine and yes, writing poetry!

Question:

Why is A talking in the third person?

Back in 30:30

Have hauled my sorry ass back to 30:30 for my seventh round. And no, of course I'm not happy. I was quite happy reading in bed, thank you. Quite happy downloading clothes for my Sims. Quite happy drinking from the husband's coffee cup. But writing? No. I don't think it's called writing anymore. Looked it up in my Angelican dictionary. It's called painful tooth extraction program.

The Pedestal Magazine:

Issue 39 is now live — with the fab poetry of Dana Sonnenschein, Christine Potter, Sonya Taaffe, Pat Daneman, Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, David Troupes, Sherre Vernon, John Hazard, Elizabeth P. Glixman, Michele Lesko, George Wallace, K. R. Copeland, Jay Udall, Amy Watkins, and Malaika King Albrecht.

And yes, I'm preening again. What can I say? Love my job... and anything else that keeps me from cleaning the house.

Though I mentioned not sending personal rejection slips anymore, I couldn't resist. There were around thirty more poets whose work I really loved but couldn't offer publication. Heck, since they write better than I do, I figured they deserve more than a form letter from the caveperson on duty.

Recent fiction with Valerie Fox:

Our short story, Beyond the Voice is now up in the April 2007 issue of Defenestration. Giggle goulash.

Incidentally, this was one of the stories we did for the Fake Memoir Contest that Wild River Review was supposed to run last year. They never replied. Eventually, the contest page was removed and nothing more was heard of that. Anyway, one of the contest rules stated that we had to base the story on something that really happened. Teehee. The Kodaikanal escape is Valerie's truth while mine is —erm— Miss Moyle, the swimming-instructress-turned-speech-teacher and her stopwatch of terror (name changed to protect the guilty). Snicker saucepan and seesaws.

Gone crazy over Christopher Paolini's The Inheritance Trilogy:

Can't wait for the third book to come out... and I hope it's soon! Spent a whole weekend in bed with Eragon and Eldest. I feel all very Annie Wilkes with impatience.

Saw the film while I was in Manila and really enjoyed it. It's halfway between LOTR and Harry Potter, but the story's nicely plotted. It's a bit bloody in some parts, but it's a really good — educational and entertaining — read for kids, I think. A lot of wisdom thrown in with reflections on war and one's values. Was impressed to learn later that Paolini was not even out of his teens when he first published the first book and that it was his parents who published it in the beginning before it came to the attention Alfred A. Knopf. Wowza.