Among Restless Plumages

APRIL FOOLS DAY
—B.Z. Niditch

Shards, cupolas, nests
a geography of shadows
on narrow roads
still seething with icicles
in naked silence
among sparrows, jays, crows,
on-going highways
your face sleeps
like birch
in the airy wind's light
among restless plumages
of lambent memories
burning out your future.

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Thanks, B.Z., for the poem, and thanks to the poets who responded with cinquains for our Seed of the Week! There is no deadline for SOWs; keep those pens a doodlin'. (No April-foolin', there...) As you'll see below, Taylor Graham went wild with the things, tacking on a septain for good measure (see yesterday's post for details of these forms). She and Katy Brown (who contributed a cinquain and a wonderful photo) have releases coming out at the SNAKE BIRTHDAY BASH next week. Be sure to join us then—watch for more details later in the week, including the e-mail newsletter, Snakebytes, which will be hitting your cyber-doorstep soon. (If you'd like to sign up for this free monthly news of Snake happenings, write to me at kathykieth@hotmail.com/ and I'll put you on the list—although, if you've ever sent ANY kind of submissions to us, you're already on the list, so don't worry about it.)


Calendar addition for this week:

•••Thurs. (4/2), 7:30 PM: Chana Bloch will be reading her poetry as well as that of Dahlia Ravikovitch, the late great Israeli poet, in Fellowship Hall of the United Methodist Church, 1620 Anderson Rd., Davis. The reading is sponsored by Israel Peace Alternatives, the Church and Society Committee of the Davis United Methodist Church, and the Celebration of Abraham. Chana Bloch is a poet, translator and literary critic. Her poetry collections are The Secrets of the Tribe; The Past Keeps Changing; Mrs. Dumpty (selected by Donald Hall for the Felix Pollak Prize); and Blood Honey (selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America, forthcoming from Autumn House Press, Spring 2010). She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs, now a Modern Library Classic; The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open (winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation); and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. She is also the author of a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (in poetry and translation), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Bloch is Professor Emerita of English Literature at Mills College, where she taught for many years and directed the Creative Writing Program. She will be reading from the translation she did with Chana Kronfeld of Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of Israel's most powerful contemporary poets.


Li-Young Lee comes to UOP!

•••Tuesday (4/28), 7-8 PM: Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee will read at Morris Chapel at University of the Pacific in Stockton, sponsored by Ethnic Studies, ASUOP, Writing in the Disciplines, Humanities Center, Celebrate Diversity, Office of the Provost, and COP Dean’s Office at University of the Pacific to celebrate Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. There will be a reception at 6:30 PM.

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, the interim President of China after the revolution led by Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) which abolished China’s monarchy and founded the first republic in 1911. Lee’s father was a personal physician to Mao Zedong before emigrating with his family in the early 1950s to Indonesia, where he taught medicine and philosophy at Gamaliel University in Jakarta and became a medical advisor to Sukarno. When Lee was 18 months old, Lee’s father’s was arrested and incarcerated as a political prisoner by Sukarno’s government. In 1959, Lee’s father escaped from prison and the entire family fled the country. After years of wandering through Macau, Japan, and Hong Kong, the Lee family settled in the United States in 1964.

Lee is the author of Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, BOA Editions, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Lee has been the recipient of a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the I. B. Lavan Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport.

Li-Young Lee
Photo by Dorothy Alexander

_________________

IN THE SHADE OF DOGWOOD
—Taylor Graham, Placerville

We come
to a secret
curve of creek. In deep shade,
look!—sudden color, shafts of light.
Foxglove.

__________________

ANNIVERSARY
—Taylor Graham

Power’s
out, your face lit
by those scented candles
we saved over the years for this
night’s storm.

__________________

64 CENTS A POUND
—Taylor Graham

I’m here
at checkout, with
shoppers lined up behind.
Checker’s forgotten the code for
turnips.

__________________

AFTER HOSPITAL
—Taylor Graham

All those
bland meals! Have some
fresh-sliced daikon radish,
startle-taste of waking back up
to life.

__________________

HOUSE HUNTING
—Taylor Graham

Someone
else’s garden
carefully tended—just
imagine, all these roses could
be mine.

__________________

BURNING IN A DRIZZLE (A Septain)
—Taylor Graham

Such weight
of winter-soaked
leaves, so many weepy-gray months.
But here’s the slash-pile’s heart of dry
tinder that’s just waiting
for the strike of
a match.

____________________

barren
awakening
raspberry stalks rock me,
twitch burning blood drops up my sleeve
to heart

—Barbara March, Cedarville

____________________

light falls
through maple leaves
like stained glass shards: this tree,
a cathedral of a thousand
colors

—Katy Brown, Davis

____________________

Photo by Katy Brown
Katy, by the way, has an on-going project
of photographing this little Sacramento tree
throughout the year, catching all of its many moods.

_________________

Today's LittleNip:

Cinquain,
not my first one,
still relatively new,
once you reach the end you wonder
the point.

—Donald Anderson, Stockton

_________________


—Medusa


SnakeWatch: What's New from Rattlesnake Press:

Rattlesnake Review: The latest Snake (RR21) is now available at The Book Collector, or send me four bux and I'll mail you one. Next deadline is May 15 for RR22: send 3-5 poems, smallish art pieces and/or photos (no bio, no cover letter, no simultaneous submissions or previously-published poems) to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. E-mail attachments are preferred, but be sure to include all contact info, including snail address. Meanwhile, the snakes of Medusa are always hungry; let us know if your submission is for the Review or for Medusa, or for either one, and please—only one submission per issue.

Also available (free): littlesnake broadside #46: Snake Secrets: Getting Your Poetry Published in Rattlesnake Press (and lots of other places, besides!): A compendium of ideas for brushing up on your submissions process so as to make editors everywhere more happy, thereby increasing the likelihood of getting your poetry published. Pick up a copy at The Book Collector or write to me and I'll send you one. Free!

COMING IN APRIL: Wednesday, April 8 will be our FIFTH ANNUAL BIRTHDAY PARTY/BUFFET at The Book Collector, featuring a SpiralChap of poetry and photos from Laverne Frith (Celebrations: Images and Texts), a littlesnake broadside from Taylor Graham (Edge of Wildwood), and Musings3: An English Affair, a new blank journal of photos and writing prompts from Katy Brown. That’s at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, 7:30 PM.

And April 15 is the deadline for the second issue of WTF, the free quarterly journal from Poetry Unplugged at Luna's Cafe that is edited by frank andrick. Submission guidelines are the same as for the Snake, but send your poems, photos, smallish art or prose pieces (500 words or less) to fandrickfabpub@hotmail.com (attachments preferred) or, if you’re snailing, to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. And be forewarned: this publication is for adults only, so you must be over 18 years of age to submit. Copies of the first issue are at The Book Collector, or send me two bux and I'll mail you one.


Medusa's Weekly Menu:

(Contributors are welcome to cook up something for any and all of these!)

Monday: Weekly NorCal poetry calendar

Tuesday: Seed of the Week: Tuesday is Medusa's day to post poetry triggers such as quotes, forms, photos, memories, jokes—whatever might tickle somebody's muse. Pick up the gauntlet and send in your poetic results; and don't be shy about sending in your own triggers, too! All poems will be posted and a few of them will go into Medusa's Corner of each Rattlesnake Review. Send your work to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. No deadline for SOWs; respond today, tomorrow, or whenever the muse arrives. (Print 'em out, maybe, save 'em for a dry spell?) When you send us work, though, just let us know which "seed" it was that inspired you.

Wednesday (sometimes, or any other day!): HandyStuff Quickies: Resources for the poet, including whatever helps ease the pain of writing and/or publishing: favorite journals to read and/or submit to; books, etc., about writing; organizational tools—you know—HandyStuff! Tell us about your favorite tools.

Thursday: B.L.'s Drive-Bys: Micro-reviews by our irreverent Reviewer-in-Residence, B.L. Kennedy. Send books, CDs, DVDs, etc. to him for possible review (either as a Drive-By or in future issues of Rattlesnake Review) at P.O. Box 160664, Sacramento, CA 95816.

Friday: NorCal weekend poetry calendar

Daily (except Sunday): LittleNips: SnakeFood for the Poetic Soul: Daily munchables for poetic thought, including short paragraphs, quotes, wonky words, silliness, little-known poetry/poet facts, and other inspiration—yet another way to feed our ravenous poetic souls.

And poetry! Every day, poetry from writers near and far and in-between! The Snakes of Medusa are always hungry.......!

_________________

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events, to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.) Medusa cannot vouch for the moral fiber of other publications, contests, etc. that she lists, however, so submit to them at your own risk. For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com). And be sure to sign up for Snakebytes, our monthly e-newsletter that will keep you up-to-date on all our ophidian chicanery.