A few I’ve worked on this week: “Radiograph” – a small poem about Marilyn Monroe’s chest x-ray from 1954.  ”Geometridae” – another small poem about it raining caterpillars during lunch one day last summer up in Montreal.  And “A History of Bicycles” – that’s the one I’m very excited about, that feels like I’ve finally embarked on the second half of “The Book of M” and the more personal poems I plan to place alongside the Marilyn poems.  The tingly moment: as I was sifting through my notes I found all these disparate passages referencing bicycles: my childhood bike, falling off a bike in Montreal two summers ago and busting my chin open, Michael’s bike getting stolen, and so forth.  So I copied them all into the same file and started compressing and hours later emerged with a little gem.  Today I finished a small one – “Arc-en-ciel” – and have about 20-30 files to choose from next.

One thing that strikes me about most of these poems is how short they are, both in line length, and total length.  ”A History of Bicycles” is the only one that spills over onto a second page, and that’s mostly due to formatting.  My goal is to get a good sheaf of them together and see how they hang and then maybe start submitting to journals again.  I will make progress on this book in 2012!

This is a collaboration issue around the theme “Icon” and I worked with the painter Judith Peck. Judith was game to entertain my Marilyn obsession/project, which forced me to write a new Marilyn poem–”M / Ghost M”–which in turn helped me explore why I ghost her voice.  And out of that grew a detour and a challenge to do a calligramme of Marilyn’s face.  It also returned me to all my art history texts about Byzantine Ikons, those flat gold fields behind the heads of empresses and saints, and inspired Judith to inlay her cracks of her portrait with gold.

One of the interesting things that came out of the collaboration was a comment Judith made about how difficult it was to paint Marilyn, how every time she went deeper and tried to add depth to the portrait, she lost Marilyn.  In discussing this with my partner, Michael, he summed it up best: “If it doesn’t look like a copy, it doesn’t look like her.”

A special 2-disc CD recording of the Songbook will also be released that day, courtesy of GPR Records.

You can order tickets here.

Here’s a preview of the CD cover:

Divining Divas.  Lethe Press.  Ed. Michael Montlack.

Includes a previously unpublished poem of mine, an homage to She-Ra: Princess of Power, called “For the Honor of Grayskull”.

A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems.  Ed. Oliver de la Paz and Stacey Lynn Brown. U. of Akron Press.

Includes my poem “Aunt Eloe Schools the Scarecrow” previously published in Ouroboros Review.

Villanelles.  Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets series.  Ed. Annie Finch & Marie-Elizabeth Mali.

Includes my poem “The Astronomer on Misnomers” which was previously published in OCHO and set to music by composer John Glover.

Mary Biddinger – Saint Monica

Joe Brainard – The Nancy Book

Andrew Demcak – Night Chant

H.D. – Pilate’s Wife

Steve Fellner – The Weary World Rejoices

Garth Greenwall – Mitko

Terrence Hayes – Lighthead

Christopher Hennessy – Love-In-Idleness

Donovan Hohn – Moby Duck

Lee Houck – Yield

Paolo Javier – The Feeling Is Actual

Saeed Jones – When the Only Light Is Fire

June Jordan – Living Room

Jee Leong Koh – Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait

Donato Mancini – Ligatures

Dante Micheaux – Amorous Shepherd

Kei Miller – The Last Warner Woman

Michael Montlack – Cool Limbo

Manual Munoz – What You See in the Dark and Zigzagger: Stories

Eric Norris – Takaaki: A Romance

Christina Olson – Before I Came Home Naked

Anne Pitkin – Winter Arguments

Eileen Pollack – In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas

Craig Thompson – Blankets and Habibi

C. Dale Young – Torn

This is where I lament all the books I couldn’t get to this year, especially the big, heavy ones like Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book and Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin.  I also hope to get to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones in January.  And 2012 releases…looking forward to Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, and Paul Lisicky’s Unbuilt Projects next year, and a number of books from Sibling Rivalry Press…  =)

The era of the pear has ended.

My annual “favorite books read this year” post will be up before the month is out.

xo

I continue to work on my Marilyn Monroe poem project.  This composition process has been much slower for me than previous book projects, but I’m kind of enjoying taking my time with the material.  The latest additions to the sequence are a poem collaboration with painter Judith Peck for an upcoming “Icon” collaboration issue of Poets&Artists magazine.  And a calligramme in the shape of Marilyn’s face.

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If you’re in NYC this weekend, and missed the world premiere of the Five Boroughs Songbook last month at Galapagos, the Queens premiere of the songbook will be Saturday at Flushing Town Hall.  There’s a composer chat at 2pm (at which I’ll be present to represent the poet side of the collaboration) and the concert begins at 3. Discount for students and Queens residents.  Here’s the link to order tickets.

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StepAway magazine has nominated “Füße: Umlauts, Eszetts, A Step” for a Pushcart Prize and for Sundress Best of the Net.  Always an honor to get a nod!

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If you’re attending the AWP conference in March 2012, please consider attending this panel:

Event Title: From Poem to Art Song: A Reading
Event Participants: Rebecca Morgan Frank, Jill McDonough, Katie Peterson, Matthew Hittinger, Randall West
Scheduled Day: Thursday, March 1
Scheduled Time: 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM
Scheduled Room, Hotel, Floor: Boulevard Room A,B,C, Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor

More details on the panel and performance to come!

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My web designer, Harlo, is working on a new look for the site that should drop in time for 2012 (and quite possibly sooner!).  It’s time to move on from the pear…

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Speaking of moving on from the pear, Spire Press is closing its doors after a 10 year run, so Pear Slip will soon be out of print.  I have a supply of copies, though, so will make the remaining stock available here on the site.  Signed, too!

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I’ve seen the first pages from Skin Shift to approve the font and book size.  Now we move on to figuring out the cover art!

Check out the poems here.  Lots of great poets in this issue!

Congrats to Allison Benis White on her win!