Things

Reworking my syllabus from fall semester to spring semester. Why, you ask? Because Spring semester is two weeks shorter than Fall semester. Unfortunately, I had to cut out some poetry readings and eliminate my individual conferences. This makes me sad. But Spring is coming. Token new-semester excitement and nervousness setting in.

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Best New Poets has named their Guest Editor for 2009: Kim Addonizio. Since I was in this year's addition, I can't submit next year, but I know it will be great. She judged the poetry contest at River Styx this year. I was a finalist and she didn't pick any of my poems, but the ones that she did choose are remarkable. Anyone considering submitting to BNP might consider buying the prize issue of River Styx, if only to see what she likes, and even if you don't gain any insight, it's a great issue of a great magazine.

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Been reading W.D. Snodgrass' Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems. I don't know if it's how he uses rhyme or what, but his stanzas feel so complete to me, at the same time open and encapsulated. One of my favorites, the final stanza from Lying Awake, describes a moth searching for light in the speaker's bedroom:

We'd ought to trap him in a jar,
Or come like the whitecoats with a net
And turn him out toward living. Yet
We don't; we take things as they are.


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Tomorrow has been designated by me as an outdoor adventure day. This means we're either going on a hike (probably McAfee's Knob) or driving up to Snowshoe to go skiing. I'm sort of hoping for the latter, despite the outrageous lift ticket prices ($75 bucks for a full day!, you kidding me!)

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Go ninja, go ninja, Go!