mimsy and outgrabe

This week has featured more reading than writing, but I'm okay with that. (Babysteps towards art-making, right?) I've vacillated between internet essays and the Bloodaxe Books' collection of Tsvetaeva essays, Art in the Light of Conscience , as well as Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. And honestly, I'm disappointed in Dark Elderberry Branch . Its subtitle is "A Reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine," and I'd hoped for more by two such well known and fairly well respected writers. They've excerpted bits and pieces of Tsvetaeva's poems as well as bits and pieces of her nonfiction scribbling -- from essays to letters -- but the sole commentary on these bits and pieces comes at the end of the collection in an essay/afterword by Kaminsky.  I'm left frustrated with the feeling that there's too little substance here. I really don't want to say that, because I was excited about the book when I found it, but the...

Back in August, a self-described "reader of poetry" (and poet himself, although he didn't let me know that at first!) named Paul David Adkins contacted me through Facebook and said that he'd reviewed my chapbook for Luna Luna Magazine. I was totally flattered and very excited and checked the magazine quite frequently to see when the review would run . . . and, well, it didn't for quite a few months. I didn't totally forget about it, but I'd resigned myself to the thought that perhaps the editors of Luna Luna didn't find the review compelling enough (because of the subject matter, my little book) or that they didn't have room for it, etc. I came up with lots of reasons inside my crazy head. And then yesterday, quite out of the blue, I found this posted to my Facebook wall. It's a really thoughtful, generous review of my chapbook. I'm touched and flattered and happy to have my poems written about so well, and at such length. So,...