WhimsyLand

We're over the hump (that's the summer solstice for you Wiccans) and the days will be getting shorter now.  On the other hand, when summer runs its course, we'll be off to the races and most literary journals will be accepting submissions again.  Speaking of which, I received a nice letter from Stephen Corey of The Georgia Review, apologizing for the delay in submissions response — not that much time had passed, actually, but I wanted to mention the courtesy and attention to detail implied by the letter.  My only other interesting incoming was a case of 2000 Chateau Potensac, which I found on the Internet for about half of what it usually goes for.  The sticker on the box said that the recipient had to be 21 and not intoxicated at the time of delivery.  This was not a problem as the only thing I drink during the day is coffee and the occasional Beck near-beer.  Which reminds me that my favorite commercial this week is the one in which the Jamaican guy says his beer is good for ugly people and hands a Red Stripe to a pasty Caucasian fellow and then says "Hooray, Beer!".  Red Stripe's motto is "helping our white friends dance for over 70 years", which seriously cracks me up.

Poets and Writers features novelists Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart on the cover and an article on confronting your second book.  Whoa, looks like Claremont Graduate University has a new first-book competition, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, with prize money of $10,000.  Brenda Hillman is judging the prestigious APR Honickman First Book Prize.  The Poetic Appraisal discusses The Poetry Foundation's survey that shows poetry is more popular than ever (or something).  It turns out that this enthusiasm is generally for older works (think, The Raven), but Rebecca Wolff thinks that keeping poetry for the poets is OK ("This is one of the things that makes ... poetry ... so compelling ... It is truly arcane.  It's a secret-magic-invisible world".  The NBA is teaming up with Penguin Books to promote literacy.  Literary MagNet discusses good gimmicks:  The Gettysburg Review passes out travel clocks at AWP, Prairie Schooner is promoting their Flyover Fiction series with balsa wood airplane giveaways, and Harpur Palate has included an edible poem by Cole Swensen in their "Food, Hunger , and Appetite" issue.  Poet and art dealer Reagan Upshaw recommends beauty as the requirement of lasting poems in Verse to Last.   There are a number of fiction-oriented articles that I passed on, and a helpful piece by Sue Bowness on designing a writer's website.

See you again in a day or two.