VOTE

Ok, they're not getting the hype that the presidential elections do, but the congressional elections have perhaps never been as important as they are this year...especially for women. I won't rant here, I promise, but I will say that it's your civic duty to vote, and you sure as hell better not complain when the government rules that women don't own our own bodies--i.e., that it's legal for non-doctor pharmacists to deny us privately-prescribed medication, that we'd have to get "permission" from our parents or husbands before seeking an abortion, or that any law whatsoever could control what goes on inside of us--because if you don't vote, that's what's going to happen. So no excuses, register, get an absentee ballot if you don't want to wait in line...or better yet, wait in line covered head to foot in pro-choice one-liners and give people something to talk about!

I think the big misconception is that the majority of the country actually wants restrictions on women's rights, and nothing could be further from the truth. NARAL Pro-Choice recently conducted a national poll of registered likely voters. Here's the good news:

*Roughly three quarters of likely voters (77%) agree that the government and politicians should stay out of a woman's personal and private decision whether or not to have an abortion.
*Two-thirds of voters disapprove of the laws passed in South Dakota and Louisiana that would ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, even for victims of rape and incest or women whose health is at risk.
*65% of voters feel less favorable toward candidates who support allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions.
*61% of voters feel more negative toward a candidate who opposes making emergency contraception available in emergency rooms for rape and incest victims.
*61% of voters disapprove when they hear Congress has voted 145 times in the last 10 years to restrict reproductive-health services, including abortion and birth control.

Americans--and not just women--are vastly in favor of the government staying the hell out of women's bodies, and don't let any conservative or religious propoganda tell you differently. If that 75% learn who their state's pro-choice candidates are and go out to vote in November, women have nothing to worry about. But that's a big if...unfortunately, the bad news is that more people vote for the American Idol than for those in charge of making laws for this country. Please vote.

Please. Vote.

Publications and books

Hi all, it's been a while, so I thought I'd break the silence with a list of books and journals with which I've recently become enamoured...and news that I have a poem forthcoming in a way cool online journal called Carnelian! :)

Cool Books You Should Read:

Jagged With Love, poems by Susanna Childress
Love Poems, by Nikki Giovanni
Late Wife, poems by Claudia Emerson
Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason
After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition, edited by Annie Finch
Open Slowly, poems by Kate Light

Cool Mags/Journals to Read and Submit to:

Fringe Magazine, www.fringemagazine.org
Ms. Magazine (all women should be reading Ms. anyway!--a magazine for women that is about bigger issues than how to get skinny or fuck your boyfriend.)
Blood Lotus, www.bloodlotus.org (shameless self-promotion)

Also, if you don't already pour over it at list twice a week like me, check out newpages.com, an inexhaustible listing of literary journals, print and online.

New villanelle...

...that breaks some rhyme scheme rules...I'm ok with it if you are!

On the Fence

The lies embedded in our silences
speak to ears which long to—shhhh,
I can’t say it. You don’t want to hear.

We’ve become adept at building fences
made of palpable, unshakable fear
to encase the lies embedded in our silences.

Every withheld syllable intensi-
fies what will never be mentioned here—
I can’t, I can’t say it…would you even hear?

Would I mean it? Is there anything redemptive
in offering what is not offered, heard clear
amidst the lies we bed, the hours of silence?

What good are these obdurate defenses?
This ache, stoic as us, begins to sear.
I’ll say it, even if you never hear.

There. (Will I remain loveless?)
Now: your turn, only what’s real.
You stick to lies embedded in silence,
even after I said it. You didn’t want to hear.

Hodge podge

Today is my last day of work for the summer, so I'm looking forward to working on my book, sending out submissions, cooking big meals, getting some sun, and sleeping past 6 AM.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that Bush overstepped his authority by detaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without reason for excessive amounts of time. Thank freakin goddess, let's tally these war crimes and impeachable offenses already!

I have 40 or so poems out to various magazines and contests, am getting ready to work out issue #3 of Blood Lotus (www.bloodlotus.org for issue #2), and in addition to my creative thesis, I'm putting together a shorter chapbook of love/loss poems called A Fling With the Ground.

My cat turns two years old tomorrow.

Pearl Jam will be on VH1's Storytellers tomorrow night at 10 PM! I'm so excited I could pee.

Just a couple of brief updates, I'll write more when more is going on.

Brand new

Endure

Golden, amethyst, chartreuse, and of course
crimson, the outward hues of humming-
birds glitter backyards, dizzying thrum
of furious propulsion, momentum
disproportionate to its tiny source.

And that’s not the remarkable part:
not all crests and vibrant bellies, their hearts
marvel at glimmer and hue when they should be
in complete awe of themselves: utterly
minute, iris stamen sized, fluttering

a lifetime of aortic symmetry
into a flash, a spell in mimicry
of light-speed. Spend each beat as if it were
your first, is the hummingbird’s fervor,
be not just energetic, but energy, endure

the heartbreak of a thousand flowers a day.

Blatant elitism

Top Ten Things You Will Only Understand If You Were at the Spalding May Rez:

1. Dry-humping is the new kissing.
2. Nice verbs.
3. Matt Ryan is god, the devil, the whip-cracking ringleader, and the hair of the dog.
4. Poets' hips don't lie.
5. There is (insert any word/phrase) in the sea!
6. Bourbon + bowling well = just as impossible as it sounds
7. The good people at the Brown Hotel really will put up with anything if you tip the bartenders.
8. "Asshole" is an extremely offensive word, and if someone calls you that, it's ok to cry to your teacher...even if you're a grown-up.
9. Everyone looks good in blonde diva wigs. Everyone.
10. Sheep receive and goats give (or something like that...).

Sex and the City

I've recently been engaging in this debate with various people: is Sex and the City doing a service or disservice to women?

One the one hand, we're talking about a show written and created by a man, with four distinct prototypes of women: 1) the super-confident, over-sexed blonde bombshell, 2) the fiery, cynical, practical redhead, 3) the prim and proper, traditional brunette, and 4) the bohemian artist who changes her look all the time and can at once be any and all of the above. Maybe the creator of this show thinks he has us all covered with these four women. Maybe it's just a modern extension of the idea that all women are either virgins or mothers, young ladies or old hags, The Madonna or The Whore.

Not to mention, there is a very unenlightened boy from my past who once said that Sex and the City teaches women that it's ok to sleep around. I disagree for several reasons, primarily because women are not collectively so stupid that we'll just blindly "do what Carrie does," but also because sleeping with whoever they want doesn't always work out so well for the women on the show. It's not like a Kools cigarette ad, where a thin, bikini-clad woman gets the muscley bad boy, apparently just because she's smoking; Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha have each suffered the wrath of the morning after, so I don't think the show is irresponsibly or inaccurately glamorizing promiscuous sex. (Also, keep in mind that the guy who said this to me is a habitual relationship-destroyer--he has a penchant for "taken" women and the drunken hook-up...and of course, his penis sees nothing wrong with that.)

My take on Sex and the City is that it characterizes four women as very different (dispelling the myth that we're all the same), self-sufficient, intelligent (all went to college and manage their own jobs and homes and finances, all discuss important issues as much as men and shoes), and most importantly, bound to each other by their womanhood. The show highlights female relationships--do you ever see their families in any of these episodes? Some would find that disheartening, but I think it's positive to see women relying on each other, on people they CHOOSE to have in their lives, on relationships they have to work on rather than chalk up to blood and obligation. Do you ever see more of any of their dates/boyfriends than you do of the four of them having lunch or drinks together, talking and laughing, or of them at their jobs?

At residency last week, I led a small group discussion on the use of the narrative "I" in the poetry of Sharon Olds. I presented not only five of her poems and a few excerpts from interviews with her in which she talks about her work, but also two quite degrading criticisms of her, mostly on the grounds that she writes about her own life. Besides the fact that I feel some of these male critics are saying nothing original, just resurrecting archaic critiques of the Confessional movement in the mid-twentieth century, I think they are attacking her subject matter (which is distinctly feminine/feminist) rather than how she actually handles the craft of poetry, and I find that to be unprofessional and incredibly sexist. One critic in particular, Ken Tucker, condescended thusly in response to a line from Olds' poem "Know-Nothing," in which she ponders, "Maybe to know sex fully, one has to risk being destroyed by it": "Oh dear. Did she learn this from the Marquis de Sade or the lead characters of HBO's Sex and the City?" My poetic response is as follows...*wicked laugh*...

21st Century Women and Poetry
For Ken Tucker

Guilty pleasures—HBO or New York cheesecake—
are best enjoyed after 10 p.m., alone.
We’ll never let any man tell us
such things aren’t valid

ways of staying sane. We have
as much right to distraction,
to pictures of hot women
in lingerie and various sexual positions,

as anyone with an erection.
Is it still 1950? Are those hard dicks
still offended by
beauty + brains + sexual freedom = woman,

enough to award it demerits
on the business end of condescension
as if we were in charm school, as if
Manolo Blahniks must accompany blandness?

Ken, do you know it is not me
who declared your rampant misogyny?
The Marquis de Sade raped and enslaved
more women than even your outdated brain.

Ken, do you know what that show is about?
It means all of us are different.
It means some of you have caused us
enough grief to fill six full seasons.

Ken, do you what that poem is about?
It’s about what women know about sex,
which might be nothing, but also might
be everything you don’t.