Writing poetry may be hazardous to your health

It's been proven, according to this Guardian article by Marc Abrahams (courtesy of the Normalcy Count Department who shared the good news to her fellow 30:30ers).

It's one of the reasons I was so freakin' happy to finish my 11th round in 30:30 yesterday.

Am taking a break now for a week or two because (1) primal energies need to focus on selecting poems for the April TPM, (2) Press 1 requires all four eyes to get its ass into HTML, (3) I have video games to play [stated in the tone of I have mouths to feed] and (4) it seems a good idea to live longer... if only for the simple pleasure of watching my face — in the mirror, in the toilet bowl, in the dentist's eyes — turn green with drink.

Recent publications:

• Just got word that Carousel 22 is "f-i-n-a-l-l-y competed [sic] and in-hand and will be appearing in stores starting this week!" Hee. Couldn't resist quoting that. I get all ticklish when it comes to typos and grammatical errors as long as they aren't mine.

Anyway, this is one stunning print journal — with no-holds-barred full-color cover and pages. The poetry, fiction and artwork are delish, too. Very eclectic tastes — they seem to like mainstream and experimental in equal parts.

• My poem, twenty-four : sawdust is now up in Sidebrow. There's only one smiley for that —>

Recently received:

• PN Review 180. Yep, in a moment of weakness, I actually subscribed. It's a UK-based print journal, A4-sized and flat-spined, which publishes poetry, reports, reviews and articles in more or less equal portions. I was particularly bowled over by Robin Maconie's article, The Way of Music: Aural Training for the Internet Generation. It's ticklish, weird, thought-provoking and... well, it's got a dog in it. Here's an excerpt:

From Book Two: Walking the Dog

1
A dog barks: Woof! Woof!
When a dog barks, there are usually two parts, a Bow and a Wow. A repeated action such as this is a basic indicator that the source of the sound is a living creature and not a random natural event. Here is a proverb: 'A tree falls only once.' Some natural sounds repeat, like a bouncing table-tennis ball or a dripping faucet. In that event we hear the sounds not as a random event, but as an organised process.

4
If you can hear it, then you can hear.
The world of sound is a picture in constant renewal. Sounds come and go. Our eyes tell us that the environment stays in place and is always complete; but for those who cannot see, the real world is a constantly-changing mosaic of momentary impressions. The more dependent we are on the sense of hearing, the more appreciative we are of what we hear.

5
In a bark, a dog exists.
In identifying a disturbance as a dog barking, the listener in effect 'calls the dog into existence'. The notion of a revealed reality is the underlying meaning of the bible creation myth.

• Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I'm still in the initial pages — it arrived last Saturday — but I'm loving it. I rather wish I'd read it before my parents passed away because, apart from teaching one how to understand death, it also gives advice on how to help/accompany the dying in the passage between life and death.

Thank you for this book, Liz!!

And more importantly [hee], thanks to the Amazon.com box, I've finally kicked away my old-sneakers-faux-nightstand. Due to the weight of my books, they've gotten all squashed and unbalanced, and it was more difficult by the night to keep everything from sliding to the filthy floor. I was seriously thinking about putting some back to their shelves. However, with Liz's box, I now get to clear the matrimonial bed and pile up to 30 books nightly in the box in less than a minute — which means less time spent watching the husband at the corner of my eyes roll his eyes and make lurid signs that have to do with one foot tapping.