mimsy and outgrabe

Since abandoning Effbook and InstaTimeSuck, I've been waaaaay out of the poetry-world drama loop. This has been a very good thing. Of course, sometimes I have twinges of Fear of Missing Out, but they are really, and somewhat surprisingly, few and far between. Also somewhat surprisingly, I've discovered that I like minding my own business. I did catch wind, however, of " that poem " published in The Nation in late July from fellow poetry bloggers, who have been more or less my one way of staying connected, however loosely, to the poetry world at-large (which is, ya know, still fairly small). I'm not going to rehash all of that here, but I thought that Kristy Bowen wrote a good meditation on crafting persona poems as a result, and so I'm sharing it here. August has begun its now-typical delivery of multiple rejections, as most of the awards and contests to which I submitted my manuscript earlier in the year (and one proposal to a conference-of-which-...

I've been trying to declutter my house for years, ever since we moved in here, really, but earnest work in this area was only really accomplished last summer and this summer. Despite these efforts, however, I've entered a new phase of hoarding: now my iCloud account is filled with clutter. Slug. This is because I compulsively take photos of just about everything, like my friend here, whom I tried to capture next to the leaf for scale and while he was stretched out fully, but only one of those two things was accomplished, clearly. This fucker was LONG. Like, I could have put a leash on him and raised him as a pet. But I didn't. Because slug. Ultimately my hoarding of pictures is really a symptom of severe Fear of Missing Out, like I can't possible remember something unless I document it with a picture and what if I can't remember it? What then am I made of? And if I'm a sum of my memories and experiences, does this mean I'm comprised of fluf...