A Few More Words on Freelancing, Publication Updates, and Coffee

I just had an iced coffee AND a regular coffee at Butterfly Herbs, so watch out. As the Joker from that first Michael Keaton Batman movie would say, I'm a real live wire. I feel like I just might shoot into orbit. Coherence is not to be expected.

One of the problems of the global economy and the Internet's widespread interconnectivity is that, while it's great to have access to business partners in far-off countries, there is still the issue of time difference. As a freelancer, this boils down to lag time between questions asked and questions answered. Hence this post. (I am waiting, I am multitasking while I wait.)

The new issue of Hayden's Ferry Review is out. My poem, "Skin" is in it. The cover art is phenomenal (see above).

It appears also that I may have some poems in Double Room. This is good news. My prose poems seem to be finding homes with more success than my lineated verse. I have a special place in my heart for prose poetry. Maybe I'm just more comfortable with the sentence as a rhythmic/semantic unit. I'll admit it--to this day, I still have no idea how or when to break a line. I usually just go with what "feels" right, which I know is no way to go about writing poetry. When I revise, I put lineated poems through so many different versions of lineation that I exhaust myself. Whatever point I reach with a poem before I get exasperated is where the poem stays in terms of form. After four years of grad school, you'd think I'd have developed a more systematic approach. But you'd be wrong. I've read Levertov, Olson, myriad books on traditional form, free verse, etc. And I still have no better sense of the line. Some instructors have told me the line should be in tension with the progression of meaning and rhythm in a poem. Others have told me the line should reflect the content of the poem. Still others have told me that it depends on the individual poem, that I'll know the right way to lineate when I see it. I've heard that lines should be able to stand on their own as beautiful things. Never end on a preposition, article, or insignificant word. Blahty blah blah blah.

So, yeah, thank God for prose poems. Three cheers for the sentence.

One phone interview tomorrow, another waiting to be scheduled. Still no place to live in Seattle. Now we're expanding our home horizons in terms of what will suffice (i.e., we've decided to be less picky). There are some lovely places in West Seattle, which I love for its beaches and ties to Richard Hugo. I do not love West Seattle, however, for the commuting obstacles it poses. How can it share the name "Seattle" and be so damned far away and difficult to get to and from? Still, I was walking on Alki beach once and saw two divers come out of the water, like something from James Bond. At first I thought they were seals and I got really excited. I remained somewhat excited when I saw that they were people. And sometimes, when the tide is low, there are purple starfish. And that's not even the caffeine talking.