mimsy and outgrabe

I have a slight crush on Joshua Mehigan right now, partially from his book of formal poems titled The Optimist , which is -- yes, you guessed it -- sitting on my treadmill and being read during 5 minute warm ups and cool downs -- but mostly because of this article published in Poetry Magazine last year, which I just got around to reading. (Kids in bed, husband at work = interweb skulking). I'm ending the evening on a slightly depressed note, however. After reading Mehigan's essay, I made the mistake of scrolling through the 25 comments posted to the Poetry Foundation's website in response to it. It turns out that the same self-important assholes who troll the HuffPost and NYTimes and AOL sites also read and feel free to vomit all over the Poetry Foundation. Is nothing sacred? And of course, I know the answer to that. No, no, nothing is sacred. I can't forget this, after all -- I'm followed around the house most of the day by a three year old who refers to me a...

This was a good writing AND reading week. It didn't begin that way, but I persevered. Persistence (i.e. bull-headness) = winning! (Shut up, Charlie Sheen.) I've managed to "complete" (yes, I'm using the quotation marks again, deal with it) another poem for the third section of the manuscript, and I made some more headway with the second strophe of the fairy tale poem. I submitted my chapbook MS to one publisher and I have plans to complete another submission this afternoon. Also, I've now read almost half of the Blank Verse book by Shaw (which really isn't difficult, it's just that I wrote more than I read this week) and continued reading David Yezzi's excellent collection of formal poetry, Azores , on the treadmill. (Yes, on the treadmill. I am nothing if not a consummate multi-tasker . . . which, I agree, isn't really ideal for an art form that requires tranquility and peaceful moments of reflection, but when you're a working mother of...