Have Words Will Travel

Yesterday I got my Fall/Winter 2008 copy of Nimrod in the mail, all glossy-covered, thick, smelling of paper and ink.  You know what I’m talking about.  Glorious.  It was even more glorious because it was the awards issue, where I expected to see my poem “Upon Cutting My Thumb While Reading Ariel,” which was a semi-finalist for the Pablo Naruda prize.  Plus, the poem had already been accepted by them for publication before I thought to enter it in the contest (which was their suggestion.)

So imagine my dismay when I eagerly scanned the table of contents to find nary a sign of my name.  It’s only two pages of contents, but I must have read those two pages seventeen times looking for my name.  Surely I’m just overlooking it, I thought, scanning more and more slowly.  As if I wouldn’t spot my own name, right?  My poem wasn’t anywhere in the book.  My stomach sank.

I was going to send a polite inquiry to the editor.  I sat down to type it up when it occurred to me that I should get my acceptance letter and make sure I was addressing the correct editor.  I dug it out of the file.  And right there, in paragraph three, it says, “Publication will be in the ‘Awards 30′ issue of October 2008, or, depending on space and appropriateness of material, one of our two 2009 issues.”

Oh.

While I’m relieved that my poem likely wasn’t lost or overlooked, I am disappointed.  I’ve been on pins and needles for months waiting for this one to arrive.  Now it’s another 6 or 12 months before I’ll see it in print.  Ah well.  The poet’s life is not one of immediate gratification, as this experience has so frustratingly reminded me.  You can bet, though, that even without the inclusion of my poem (ha) this issue of Nimrod will be a good one, and I’m looking quite forward to reading it.

Last night I attended the last of four Red Hen Press readings in New York, and it was outstanding.  (I went to the first reading as well–Friday night at KGB Bar–which was also wonderful.)  Being relatively new in town, I hadn’t yet been to the venue, The Cornelia Street Cafe, but it was charming.  I will definitely be back — they have stuff going on there every night, much of which is poetry-related or jazz, another favorite genre of mine, so it’s well worth the travel time for me.

All of the readers were excellent, but the one who stood out the most was Laure-Anne Boesselaar.  She knocked my socks off with the single, long poem she read, the name of which escapes me, but it was a poem that wove together a train ride to New Jersey from NYC and the speaker’s early childhood in a convent school and how much she longed for her mother.  The poem spoke to me in so many ways.  I believe it’s from her most recent book A New Hunger, which you can bet I’ll be acquiring posthaste.  I have the feeling I’m going to be very touched and inspired by her work.

Thanks to my friend and fellow poet Linda Dove for sending me this link:

National Endowment For the Arts Funds Construction of $1.3 Billion Poem

My favorite bit:  “If the planners can secure an additional $6.2 million in funding, they may affix a long dash to the end of line three, though Gioia said that is a purely optimistic projection at this stage.”

Hee!

We have returned from vacation, all three children are back in school, and today was my first day alone in my house with peace and quiet for writing and po-biz.  I worked for awhile on a flash fiction piece I’m writing for an anthology.  I read most of a collection called Sisters by Nickole Brown (look for a review in the coming days), which isn’t technically writing, but it does feed the pool from which my poetry comes.  And then a poet friend challenged me to write a poem about the Large Hadron Collider, which was fired up today in Geneva.  Physics is a particular passion of mine and I was very excited that they finally got the thing up and running.  So, although I know a lot about the LHC and what it’s supposed to do, I spent a couple of hours researching it, and wow is there a lot of natural poetry present in physics.  I’m dreaming of a whole collection of poems inspired by physics.  It’s a big task — it’s not easy to write about science in a way that’s accessible and evocative.  But I always enjoy a challenge.