the INLAID EAR

Question: is blogging still a thing? Effective for purposes of what? And then? But anyhow, here is this project I'm thinking on, and maybe if I start to post the pieces here, they will appear to coalesce (I love the word coalesce) into something besides coal in lumps. The Words Thing: short poems titled with the single words the poems are about. Favorites. Least favorites. Fascinations. Miscellaneous. Embouchure. Heliofranticulating.  Ah, the spell check doesn't like old coins. All the better. So:  Rote This , written, is set unchanging in place. Still this, literally this, set. I may change my mind but these words, these this-es, repeated, are rote.

The fortune cookie fortune says "YOU ARE AN ARTISTIC PERSON. LET YOUR COLORS SHOW."

Oh, I should take a picture of the hardbound book that's served me since around October. It's been a good one. Some one-offs that I want to save: Sesquipedalophobia, the fear of long words, makes sufferers distressed when they find out the name of what they have. Would I trade the fantasy of world peace for the illusion of personal peace? What gets me is not knowing that i could die at any moment so much as knowing that I am at every one.

Found out my book One Way to Ask is on the new releases shelf at the Richmond Public Library. I must go visit it. My mind also says: bring copies to El Cerrito, Albany, Berkeley, etc., etc. They will host a reading of the Richmond Anthology of Poetry in April and One Way to Ask in May! Through Natasha Dennerstein I have met Maw Shein Win, the poet laureate of El Cerrito. We talked about co-hosting at some point. Busy day ahead, but hope to submit The Trip in its new revision today.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I am working on a series of haiku that, although uncredited, will be the best read poems I've ever written. I am writing a series of haiku that will appear throughout the worldwide facilities of a very large tech company, okay Google, to gently remind employees to behave in polite and respectful ways. When launched, I will try to post photos.

Wrote a new poem draft, probably to about 80% "done," following a listing for poems about donuts. Mine is about the slang "jelly donut," that my old comedy group used to use for jokes that lacked an idea and a punchline, an unformed joke or bit. Made a significant change to "The Trip," a sequence of 37 poems about my family's summer trip. I took out the largely unneeded epigrams on each poem. That change followed feedback from rehearsing my reading of selected poems from The Trip at Tell It On Tuesday. The show is next Tuesday, February 28, and it will be better than it would have been thanks to the rehearsal and this change. Also made improvements to two poems in the sequence. Sent a copy of Richmond Anthology of Poetry to the SF Poetry Center at SF State University following introduction to one of the curators through my friend, poet Lauren Schiffman. Sifted through poetry listings for possible future submissions for The Trip. Received po...

Resparking the habit of frequent poem-writing this National Poetry Month, I've been putting the poetry prompts from both Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo.net into my hopper.Today's NaPoWriMo offering was too good to resist: Book spine poems! Lauren and Mirabai did some, too. The family that poems together, shows 'em together. I like the use of refrain. I'm pretty pleased with this one:   Lauren had similar thoughts, using two books I was planning to use. We tend to think alike and arrive at the same places at the same time. It's uncanny. Mirabai's sweet poem: An Acceptable Time Teach Yourself to Dream KEEP OUR SECRETS HUG All the World What will you come up with?