See ya

For the next 10 days I'll be here:



(If I don't get back to you today, it will just have to wait. Sorry.)

We promise not to bore you, befuddle you, or drone on tooooooooo long.

Bonus: We do not read in "the poetry voice." Unless we are kidding.

Jennifer "El" Knox & I are starting to book some readings for the fall when our new books are out. Probably not as many as last time. That was nuts (but the fun kind of nuts).

Confirmed so far: Buffalo & Brooklyn (at least twice). Also Jen will be going to DC & Tallahassee.

We be driving, so allllllllll that distance to Buffalo would be better with more than one gig.

Anybody in Toronto or Saratoga Springs or Ithaca or upthataway wanna play, say late Oct?

Anybody else, anywhere else?

Holla, puhlezze. [Email in upper right.]

You know you're a nerd...

...when you spot an "unattended" bag of jumbo binder clips in the office and you get SO EXCITED.

I am *slammed* this week. But vacation starts Friday.

I have a voluminous post of more Summer Reading half-prepared for the DIY blog, so watch that space, I guess. Hopefully I'll get it up there before I head out, because...I WILL NOT BE ON THE INTERNET FOR 10 ENTIRE DAYS. Ahhhhhhh.

If you have a hotmail.com account & have emailed me...

...recently, I may not have received your message.

The domain was accidentally added to my Blocked Sender list by an overzealous spam filter.

I'm not sure how long this was going on--maybe two weeks? Anything sent Friday or later has come through.

If your message was important, please resend.

Thanks (& sorry for the inconvenience)!

& speaking of pussies

(Details here. It's amazing.)

[time's up]

good for

Radio silence

I'm OK (thank you), but busy, preoccupied with nonblog/offline things, & sort of in a sheltering mood.

Saying no isn't easy. Particularly when what you're turning down is both attractive *and* repugnant: I'd like to say yes, because I'm an idealist. But I have to say no for the same reason. Sometimes I wish I were *that person,* but (as I find it tiresome & useless to object) I am not.

Also, I had a major computer meltdown over the weekend thanks to some corrupted fonts & the generally fucked organization of the hard drive by somebody I never should have let within 10 feet in the first place, curses. I should have fixed this a long time ago, but it's gonna take DAYS, so I keep procrastinating. At least one partition needs to be completely wiped & rebuilt to really fix the mess.

Maine Escape 2007 begins next Friday though. & even though I don't need it as desperately as I usually do this time of year (we can thank county-road living for that, yes) I'm nevertheless SO READY. I've already been stacking up books to take. Big fat ones.

Blooftastic

Rock. Just finished the interior layout for Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk by Noon.

The new edition of A Gringo Like Me will be available as soon as she's proofed it and the cover has been resized too. (The SSP version was 5.5 x 7.5, and the Bloof version will be 6 x 9.)

Speaking of hilarious/tragicomic/empathic poets, check out "The Dangerfield Conundrum," a rountable discussion from the HUM-PO list in the new Jacket here.

The Weekly Box: Week Four

We did get tomatoes! Just 2 though, and they weren't deep red, more of a medium orange with greenyellow near the stem end, but mmmmmmmmm. I could smell them from the back seat as I drove them home yesterday. So we had BLTs for lunch today, on toasted whole wheat with the sliced Jersey tomato, turkey [tempeh*] bacon, [vegan*] mayo and a big pile of the farm's green leaf lettuce. Grey sea salt and fresh ground pepper--must not (never) skip that. Has there ever been a simpler, more delicious sandwich? I doubt it. (Well, maybe with pork bacon, but dang, and I didn't have it on hand.) Some leftover gilled zucchini from last week's box on the side.

We also got 2 more zucchinis, 2 more heads of lettuce (two reds, as we have some green left), a bunch each of collards (my current favorite green) and kale (okay I love that too), 2 cucumbers, 2 bunches of baby onions, and 1 head of green garlic (stalks left on--it's curing now, dangling from a hook on the back porch). They also offered cilantro and parsley in the choice groups, and more fennel, but we're good for herbs at the moment and we did fennel last week, so I got the onions instead. I have to be careful not to take my full share sometimes. It really is more than we can use, depending on how that day's harvest goes, and it's a shame to waste. (They sell the members' leftovers at the weekend farmer's markets.)

Tonight I'm making a version of this, using the escarole and ruby chard from last week's box (yes, it's still fresh as a miracle in the crisper) and maybe a bit of this week's kale. I think I'll make a batch of my [TVP*] meatballs (with fennel seed and parsley, no breading, no egg) to put in to make it a little heartier. (More thunderstorms late afternoon--the valley ridge to the north is pinked gold with bluegreen trees and zaftig damp, but cool with little puffgusts.)

*[This post has been modified because I have since gone vegan.]

Jumps Journal

The first issue.

Shanna Compton
Andrew Epstein
Frank Giampietro
Lily Hoang
Janet Holmes
David Kirby
Rebecca Lehmann
Reb Livingston
Amber Pearson
Sandra Simonds
Jay Snodgrass
Kristine Snodgrass
Valerie Wetlaufer

...and some very cool macro-focus textural photos. Check it out.

The Weekly Box

Had forgotten about the fronded fresh fennel. Made a cioppino with that last night, sauteed with sweet onions & garlic, tomatoes, then bubbled with Pernod, fresh basil, saffron stock, steamed some shrimp & turbot, then added seared scallops right at the end. [Today I would just add more veggies like fingerling potatoes, maybe some tofu or vegan dumplings*.]

Saturday morning at another farm (not ours) I did make out the yellow-green globes of tomatoes. How many weeks to count down?

[This post has been modified because I have since gone vegan.]

The DIY blog is fresh...

...or not so fresh, depending on how you look at it.

More than you probably ever wanted to know about how I personally feel about POD strategies and digital-printing technologies for publishing poetry right here.

When your eyes stop bleeding from all the tech-infested prose, go read Reb for awhile, why don'tcha?