So this is sort of indicative of how my week has been going: I'm driving my son to his music lesson from our house and I think I've timed it as usual but I'm ten minutes late because usually I'm in the center of town, which is ten minutes away, so of course the instructor has left by the time I get there--and when my husband gets home, who is the one in contact with the instructor, I want to send an apology via email, which he does--only to find out when he checks his email that the instructor had canceled. Canceled earlier in the day.
My chapbook, Just Beneath Our House I Hide My Other Body, is in the First Ever Hyacinth Girl Press Thunderdome! Margaret Bashaar, editor extraordinaire, is, instead of just putting up lists of semi-finalists, finalists, and the four winning chapbooks, making brackets instead, and out of hundreds of manuscripts, mine is one of 32 to battle it out. So that's exciting and very entertaining.
I think I told you that I was enrolled in what's called a MOOC course, which stands for a Massive Open Online Course, about How Poets Write. It has been such a great course and I've loved watching the videos. If you're interested, here's a link to one of the videos on you-tube. It's about the pleasure of poetry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cdVX7RRsk One of the things the videos have been stressing is ways of using constraints or rules to get you to write a poem in surprising ways.
And one of the books they suggested reading was Srikanth Reddy's Voyager, which I just bought. He had a whole process about how he wrote this book, using the memoir of Kurt Waldheim, that he talks about here at this link. It's quite fascinating.
Minotaur
by Peter Kline
You wound a ball of twine around my eyes
then pinned the end between my fingers.
You gowned me in white tissue
like a hothouse nectarine.
The furtive door at last unbarred, I was
amazed at the garden's suggestion
throating from vining flower-walls
in breaths that quickened with mine.
How long I lingered beneath
sun awnings and a stone-and-mortar sky,
only you know. For when I found the throneroom
festooned with pelvis bones,
the twin-fingered god on whose nether lip I hung
a kiss, a crape-gartered barb,
was you--you the pursued, yours
the bull's head draped with fragrant lash-black hair.
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