Goose Hill

So it's now nearly August, my basil plants seem to be thriving and the rosemary is still green. The garlic bulbs have grown shoots and gone a bit brown but they're still too young and small to dig up, so I think harvest-time will come in a few more seasons. I have also gotten two poetry submissions together for literary magazines. Three poems each, I have submitted one set to Weave magazine , a great small-press magazine to which I just began subscribing; and the second set I plan to submit to Ecotone , a university-press journal (to which I am also a recent subscriber) with the awesome tagline: "reimagining place." How cool is that? I am hopeful but I don't expect publication. We'll see. This may be my lucky break. I was also recently offered to come aboard the newly-created Chestertown Book Festival, to be known as ChesBookFest . I was nominated to the position of secretary of the official planning committee and I have to say that I am very excited to be a p...

it grows? Apparently even my refrigerator is better with botanicals than I am. I've had these huge clumps of garlic that I bought at Super Fresh since last August maybe. I obviously bought more than I needed at the time and so never used that much of it. When I looked in the veggie drawer a while ago, I noticed my garlic had begun to sprout some green. I was at my friend Annie 's yesterday and we were looking around in her garden. What I thought were onions, she informed me, were actually little garlic shoots. She said that instead of just throwing out her garlic when it had begun to go green, as mine were, she planted them instead. What an absolutely obvious and wonderful idea! Of course, this had not occurred to me. So last night, I peeled every single garlic clove in those huge clumps. I now have 32 garlic babies to plant. Wow. And now that I am actually beginning to embrace the cooking-at-home thing, I may actually be able to use what I harvest. Mmmm... and my herb garden e...

Well, the basil and rosemary have been transplanted from their plastic pots to the tiny herb garden by the back door. The only problem I can foresee is that, now that trees have filled out for summer, they might not get as much sun as they want. All my research tells me that both basil and rosemary like LOTS of sun. So, we'll see, I guess. I inherited my mother's brown thumb, so I have a bit of a curse to work against when it comes to nurturing plant life, something I'm hoping to overcome. I also managed to break out of this latest writing slump. I actually managed to come up with a poem fragment last weekend that, I think, has quite a bit of potential: Rainy Evening from the Chester River Bridge Street-light runs down the riverside like mascara her inked-up winking streaked and ... And that's all I've got so far. But it's something! I feel refreshed now. Maybe I'll even manage a little something this week. I've also been developing more ideas for the co...

Inspired by poet-professor Jehanne Dubrow's blog post "Someday Soon" , I've decided to create a new list of my personal goals for the near future. I also did this last summer, but with pen and paper, and it really can be helpful: * to plant (and not kill) the basil and rosemary seedlings I have waiting out back in their temporary containers. * to write one poem a week even if it's crappy (although I'd rather it be wonderful and fulfilling). * to get Chester Cat Press started with Emma . * to find some suitable, non-plastic lawn furniture. * to make some more pesto (hopefully, with the basil in my tiny herb garden), and pesto mayo. Mmmm... * to make something tangible of my collaboration with my painter-friend Emily , maybe a handmade chapbook, poems and illustrations, bound with red linen thread. Hmmmm... * to submit more poems to literary magazines. * to get my grandmother's 1950s Smith-Corona manual typewriter fixed-up and unstuck so I can use it to type...

So says Neil Gaiman. And I agree with him, but he also clarifies that statement saying that we do in fact get stuck on occasion. It's not as serious a situation as the term "writer's block" suggests with it's clinical sounding name, kind of like "tennis elbow" or "library knee" (which is when the knees audibly crack every time one bends them due to years of book-shelving--so, I made that one up, but I definitely have it). The point is, that kind of hypochondria won't fly around here anymore. But I have been stuck in my writing for quite a few weeks now, which tends to be a bit depressing and frustrating. I think my problem right now is more a lack of focus. I have all this pent up creative energy, this great urge to write, but I am really struggling with the ability to focus this energy on a particular subject. I want to write, but I don't know what I want to write about and that doesn't really do much good. My hope is that,...

Lately, I've been considering the fun of collaboration. My new friend Emily is a painter who has similar obsessions with folk and fairy tales and the like; and right now she's mulling over a few poems of mine to illustrate. I can't wait to see what she imagines visually from my words. Not to mention how flattered I am that she even wanted to use my poems as inspiration. I've often said that one of the reasons I was drawn to poetry as far back as I can remember is that I have no talent for visual art. Poetry allows me to express these often very visual ideas that I have, but with words rather than line and color and texture. I'm excited to see the reverse of this, to see what someone else sees when they read my poetry, to see what I could not draw or paint on my own. While I'm waiting on that project, I decided I'd try it the other way around: write a poem based on one of Emily's paintings. Ironically enough, I had actually started a poem a few months a...

Bookmaking is another activity of mine. Put that together with the writing, reading, letterpress printing, and library-work and I'm a very well-rounded bibliophile. A recent project of mine was making reversible poetry journals. By reversible I mean that the cover art allows for either end to be the front. It could even end up being a two-headed notebook; it's just full of possibilities, as most blank pages are. This "cover art" though is actually segments from "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop (one of my favorites).