WhimsyLand

I think I entered a state of grace this morning.  It was as if someone was playing that big country music record in the sky backwards.  I think I'm finally over this flu, which is a plus.  Sweet Junie is coming to visit on Saturday.  Then, I got another couple of poems accepted by The Journal, which is a publication I like.  Of course, I don't remember sending them anything, but that's what I said about Blackbird.  I shipped the first version of The SlowDown Algorithm to the client this morning, after spending 10-12 weeks laboring on what was quoted as a two-week problem.  Later in the day, the editor of That Noted Journal accepted my second review.  At this point, I was pretty much walking on air.  To top it all off, Der and I got a father-son haircut from The Fabulous Natasha and then went over to Brewing Market for their killer latte and a bagel.  The father-son haircut means, of course, that the son gets any haircut he wants and the father pays for it, but that's OK.  The Fabulous Natasha is our new interim hair person, as Whitney is "on sabbatical" (we were told), not that I'm sure what that means in the hair biz.  As usual, I printed out the copy of my picture from my personal site, the one where I'm wearing the New Sincerity T-shirt, and took it with me.  "Just like that", I told her, and so she proceeded to chop off a small mountain of peppery hair, some black, mostly gray (or grey, if you're English). 

The reviews were very difficult to write, much more so than I would have imagined.  I used to knock off a poem in a night, take a day to stew over it, post it on the poetry board, take some criticism, make some corrections and send it off.  Both reviews have taken 3-4 weeks to write each.  Of course, that wasn't a full-time endeavor, but I found I needed a lot of incubation time to find what exactly I wanted to say about each of the books.  It didn't help that I love the work of both poets involved and hold them in high personal esteem, as well.  That kinda puts the pressure on.  You want to be fair, and you want to be eloquent, and you want to be entertaining, but you also want to be true to the work.  I decided that I owed it to everyone (the sponsoring journal, the poet under the lens, and myself) to read all existing reviews of the books for which I was responsible.  I wasn't worried unduly about subconsciously cribbing from their riffs, but I did think hard about whether I agreed with them on metamatters.  Such as narrative arc or gestalt or whatever it is reviewers (and particularly blurbers) feel compelled to bestow on volumes of poetry, even if they are perfectly dandy collections of work without any particular agenda.  Anyway, somewhere along the way, I ended up reading Simon and Jordan's reviews and was struck with the thought:  how do they make this seem so easy, and why can't I be as scintillating?  Oh, well, I suppose reviewing is like anything else.  You take your best shot and get better at it as you practice your craft.

The new Many Mountains Moving journal arrived in proof form yesterday, and I drove over to hand it off to Malinda Miller, our journal editor.  Malinda runs a group at CU and is responsible for their monster website among other things, managing a lot of full-time employees and contractors in the process, so she was just terrific in her role as Journal UberMeister.  It looks terrific, and we should have copies available at our table at the AWP Book Fair.  Look for Jeff Lee, Malinda, Patrick Lawler (who sponsored the EcoPoetry section), and Erik Nilsen at various times during The Big Show. 

Oh, and I had a wonderful birthday party last night.  Cath and the kids had to wait until Der and I got back from CA, but it was worth the wait.  Cath cooked up a tapas party with Spanish tortilla, jamon Serrano, nuts and olives, a kind of Spanish snack with tomatos and pine nuts on toast, Manchego (cheese) cubes, big pieces of roasted red pepper and lots of other good stuff, all lubricated with a nice Ribera del Duero.  Dessert was a dark chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.  Der and Ky put 58 candles on the thing, some spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY, some twisted and sinister, some apparently in the shape of farm animals.  They burned and sputtered and lagooned all over the chocolate icing as I mustered the remaining breath to extinguish them in one wish-fulfilling blow.  I did though, and I think that means that World Peace is right around the corner.

Talk to you tomorrow.  I know, I always say that.