I complained that I was too stupid to use Duotrope but, while I’m no smarter than I was, I found using a different browser corrected the problem.

Still, I’m left with the problem of going and looking over my submission tracker and realizing that I’m being a hell of a slacker. Maybe ignorance was bliss.

I had a strange thought earlier today, wondering about Eliot Spitzer’s behavior, and his wife standing next to him at his speech.

I can’t imagine what could bring a woman to do that, aside from politics. Aside from those brief brushes with power.

Do men know that they can’t control themselves, do they know that they will lose their wives, that they will lose everything, and then they go into politics almost with the notion that she won’t walk away from the marriage if there’s a chance at power, even power by proxy? Is that power the rope that binds these people together?

Some women say no. Some women must be saying no, I won’t go on TV, I won’t stand by your side, I won’t. But most do. Most stand for it. Most seem to accept it as something that comes with the territory. “If you don’t stand here, June/Gloria/Yvonne, you lose everything.”

Maybe freedom really is just another word for nothing to lose.

NaPo is just around the corner. You need the practice. Poetry telephone! It’s fun! Like Twister!

The game:

Take the given poem. Rewrite it. You can change it as much or as little as you like. Post your rewrite on your blog (drop a comment here or send me an email if you want me to link to you) and link to the poem you rewrote. Someone else rewrites yours. Ad infinitum.

The start:

Revelations

A stronger wind reveals the shape of things,
as leaves peel back from blackened twigs, or hair
displays our curving skulls. A kite’s frayed strings
uncoil like asps, then snap. The lawn chair’s wings
emerge when it takes flight. The skirt betrays
the thighs while mortar cracks in walls once square.
Deep-footed oaks tug at the ground and craze
the hunching concrete walk. A draft surveys
the floorboards like a tomcat. Snow falls up
and drifts the sky. Every straight thing bends
to greet the ground. Although our faces cup
the wind in hollows, skin can’t comprehend
the jut of bones, the way the cyclone’s maw
can find the sharp spear heart inside the straw.

Ready, set, go!

… than the sea dragon?

This is a picture of one. Yes, it’s an animal. No, it’s not a plant, though there is a plant in the picture, too.

It’s just weird. Weird, man.

I figure peace cranes will make me at least as much money as poetry does.

This guy has been waiting a long time for a candidate like Obama.

He was on the table at the Obama headquarters. If I knew why, I’d tell ya.

Forecasts calling for inches upon inches of snow.

It’s not supposed to snow here, not like that.

It just supposed to snow enough to be slushy and ugly. Not inches and inches. Not *shudder* feet.

One way that a poetry blog fails is no matter how neato the poetry might be, there’s no sense of a community finding a poem all at the same time, experiencing it all as a group.

There’s something to be said for the sort of group experience that comes from, say, watching a favorite TV show as it airs, or reading a massive bestseller as soon as it’s chosen by Oprah Winfrey. Just taking part in a site like Goodreads allows us all to see and be aware of what someone else is tackling. But the fracturing and fragmentation of poetry means that we can all very rarely have that sense. We can all very rarely know who has read what, and when.

Rob Mackenzie has challenged himself to read “Paradise Lost” during March, and despite my utter lack of desire to read that again, I felt a little tempted just because the dynamic of a group read can be so different than an individual undertaking.

Journals, of course, do put us on a bit of a schedule. There was a buzz, at least amongst many people I know, about the latest issue of Umbrella, and we could all go and read it around the same time. Still, how many of the people reading this post have read that issue of Umbrella? What have we all read? Is there any common ground?

Can we build a common ground through a common reading list? Can we Oprahfy our reading goals rather than flying around willy-nilly? Is there value in it? I must think there is or I wouldn’t be talking about it. But am I the only one who finds such shared reading experiences valuable?

As always, Nic of Very Like a Whale has spurred an interesting conversation, this time about how long to let a poem sit before sending it out. Also see here.

Maybe I look at it all wrong, but I tend to view earlier poems of mine as just that–earlier. They may have flaws, they are certainly not the same poems I would write now, thank god. I don’t want to be stagnant and safe. So, if I let a poem sit for 10 years, the Julie who came back to edit it would barely be the Julie who wrote it. The older me would be a better me, or a cooler me, just older. My techniques change, my preferred topics and forms and linebreaks and diction change. I wouldn’t write “Sparrow” again. I couldn’t if I wanted to.

In a way, refusing to send work out until its been around for years is like refusing to go outside because you might be wearing shoes that will go out of fashion. Sure, there are pictures of me from the 80s where I look like the biggest doofus in history, and there are poems by me that I hardly recognize. We are each changing. At each stage, we don’t need to update our poems to fit our new brains. We can start on a new poem, capture a new reality, sing a new, new song.

And having a chance to giggle at pictures like this is just icing on a fresh, delicious cake. (Sorry, Steve.)