Settled at last

I've just received the settlement cheque for my jaw injury--or, to use the legal term, dental negligence. I feel elated and relieved--mostly the latter. The validation of it means a lot to me.

Current Issues

Early this year I decided I wanted to expand the reach of the poems forthcoming in Divining for Starters by placing them in new magazines, including more in the US, and I've succeeded. I have Divining poems in the current issues of Shearsman and Cannot Exist, and more coming out in Angel Exhaust, Painted, Spoken, and Bombay Gin--all but Shearsman are first appearances. I'm especially pleased by the acceptance from Bombay Gin as it's Naropa's journal and I've admired it for some years now.

Poems for The Tethers and other manuscripts are in current issues of Poetry Ireland Review and The Warwick Review, with more forthcoming in Court Green, New Welsh Review, and Poetry Wales. All is well.

Women Poetry Editors

A couple years ago I remember talking with other women poets in London about submitting to UK magazines. "So many of the editors are men" kept coming up as an issue we weren't sure how to contend with.

That's changed, at least as far as magazines are concerned. While Fiona Sampson has been at the helm of Poetry Review some years now, in the last year Zoë Skoulding has taken over editorship of Poetry Wales, Kathryn Gray of New Welsh Review, and now Caitriona O'Reilly at Poetry Ireland Review (not UK really, but as close or closer to us than Northern Ireland). Not only are they all women, but women in their late thirties/early forties, still establishing themselves and to that end (insofar as I've seen with Zoë and Kathryn; there's yet to be an issue of PIR edited by Caitriona) taking risks and making claims, trying to stir discourse into discussion if not debate.

Anyone want to do a survey of a round of the UK magazines akin to Spahr and Young's in "Numbers Trouble," to look at the percentage of women poets in magazines--and in what magazines, at what levels? The London Review of Books, for example, appears to favour male over female poets by a significant proportion. Thoughts?

Neue Rundschau 119/2

I'm pleased to say that two of my poems (both Divinings) have been translated into German and published in the new issue of Neue Rundschau as part of special section on Shearsman. I only wish I could read German to assess the translation.

Losing Face

After nearly four years, my lingual nerve injury seems to have become a little worse, with a new symptom. While my left chin/lower jaw feels numb and pained to varying degrees all the time, the last two nights the numbness has radiated over much of the rest of my face. Have you ever had an itch underneath thick fabric, like jeans, so when you scratch you feel the pressure, but not the sharpness? That is how this feels, like my whole face (especially lower) is coming off of a shot of novocaine. It lasted an hour or so last night, and it began again about ten minutes ago. Maybe it has something to do with fatigue, as I've also been ill? The maxillofacial surgeons I saw in London this summer told me about the erratic behaviour of injured nerves (sometimes, for example, I feel pain in the opposite jaw; sometimes, for no apparent reason, the pain becomes very sharp), but this is something new entirely.

I'm posting this because I have been working off and on on an essay about my injury and its many varied effects on my life, as I go about and hardly anyone knows what I'm experiencing. That feels strange to a person so given to expression and expressiveness. I wish people could see it somehow, some twinge in the skin or the like; its invisibility upsets me more than I can explain--and so my desire to try to write about it.

Lorine Niedecker's North Central (London: Fulcrum, 1968)

NB: as Blogger does not allow indention (as far as I know), the placement of lines is sometimes incorrect.



Beauty: impurities in the rock

"Lake Superior"

We are what the seas
have made us

longingly immense

*

Ah your face
but it's whether
you can keep me warm

*

Sewing a dress


The need
these closed-in days

to move before you
smooth-draped
and color-elated

in a favorable wind

*

Shelter


Holed damp
cellar-black beyond
the main atrocities
my sense of propriety's
adrift

"Traces of Living Things"

Pigeons
(I miss the gulls)

mourn the loss
of people
no wild bird does

"Wintergreen Ridge"

Issue 1, The Fake Poetry Anthology

To read about this phenomenon, take a look at The Poetry Foundation's announcement. I, along with over 3,100 over poets, am included, but as I've heard of most of the others, it's not my poem with my name--I don't even think I've used the word balsam in a poem.

Personally, I think it's hilarious. Others?

Yet reviewed in Sphinx

There's a conscientious review of Yet by Eleanor Livingstone, though I'm afraid the book was lost on "The Young Reader," as I would expect it to be. (If one has no experience of reading experimental poetry, if one doesn't just try to ride the associations and sounds, of course the work will appear impenetrable.)