Goose Hill

Last month I experienced a flash of poetic clarity that delivered itself signed and sealed care of one of my favorite horror movie classics: The Silence of the Lambs . During my probably twenty-seventh viewing, that steady refrain of "Starling" throughout the script just lit up all over the dialogue for me, her name/species bouncing from the mouths of male mentor/villain Hannibal Lecter to male mentor/hero Jack Crawford. These lines addressing "Starling" over and over seemed to me the perfect jumping-off points for a new mini-series of poems, addressing Agent Clarice Starling as both young woman in a male-dominated world chasing a killer of women and small bird eluding threats both wild and domestic. These lines will become my poem titles and these poems will be nested inside the Catechesis manuscript as a different variation on the same themes I've already been writing toward. Here are the movie lines I have gleaned so far to use for these poem titles: ...

This week, for fun, I put together a little music playlist to go along with my poetry manuscript-in-progress, Catechesis . These are songs that I feel create the perfect soundtrack to the poems I'm writing and the headspace I'm inhabiting while writing and revising them. No wonder I like hanging out with these poems so much.     1.  "Where I End and You Begin (The Sky is Falling In)" / Radiohead  2.  "Yes, Anastasia" / Tori Amos   3.  "The Dress Looks Nice on You" / Sufjan Stevens     4.  "There There (The Boney King of Nowhere)" / Radiohead     5.  "Strange Little Girl" / Tori Amos   6.  "July Flame" / Laura Veirs   7.  "Llaw = Wall" / The Joy Formidable   8.  "Daffodil Lament" / The Cranberries   9.  "If I Had a Heart" / Fever Ray   10.  "Idioteque" (Radiohead cover) / Amanda Palmer (on her magical ukelele)

After taking about a year off from submitting to focus on generating more material, I am starting this new year with a bit more ambition. Today, I submitted poems from the growing Catechesis manuscript to six literary magazines/journals, quite a few of which I am sure are still out of my league. But the only way to graduate from your current league is to try out for the next level, right? (or some other sort of mixed-up sports metaphor from someone who doesn't have a great understanding of the concept)   Here's today's list: Fairy Tale Review (The Ochre Issue) THRUSH Poetry Journal Gigantic Sequins South Dakota Review Rattle , and.... POETRY MAGAZINE !   So this is really a landmark day for me. It is the first time I have screwed up the courage to submit my poems to the one and only POETRY Magazine. I'm starting the year with a reasonable amount of hope. A encouraging rejection in the next few months would make me happy enough.  

  The long-anticipated  fifth-anniversary  double-issue   of   Sugar House Review   is HERE ! Receiving my beautiful, brightly-colored contributors' copies of Sugar House Review , issue 10 was the cherry on top of my much-needed holiday break. My Angela Carter poem "Fevvers (Authenticating the Cockney Venus)" is in this jam-packed volume with words from poet-friends like Donna Vorreyer, Laura Madeline Wiseman, and so many talented others. My poem is right across the page from a poem by Sara Eliza Johnson, writer of the 2014 collection Bone Map ! I'm so excited to be among such fabulous company. Get your own copy of this gorgeous magazine here .   Happy New Year, friends!

I've spent the past year in the very slow construction of a poetry collection that is only now a quarter of the way to completion. I took a break from submitting to focus on the writing of new work for this manuscript and it has resulted in a whole new writing approach for me: writing as architecture, writing each new poem as a part of some larger work. In this way, writing toward an eventual book feels like a much different process from writing individual poems with no endgame in mind.      I'm closing the year with a grand total of 14 pieces for my Catechesis manuscript (which is 8 more than I started with). I must admit that over the past months I have been frustrated and impatient with my slow progress, but I am very happy with these new poems in which I am creating a mixed-up kind of folklore with a loose narrative that spans from poem to poem. Here are a few of them: "Girl with no Hands" & "Interlude," in The Feminist Wire , June 25, 201...

During my poem-a-day challenge for NaNoWriMo 2014, I've given myself the freedom to experiment with some different forms that I've been curious about, but a little too bashful to try before. I know what that sounds like, but different poetic forms, especially some of the more contemporary/experimental ones, can be a little …intimate. Well, very intimate, actually. Erasure of text from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle . page 165. I'm still figuring out how I feel about erasure as a poetic form. I'm not sure that I would lump my erasures into the same category that I would my poetry. The hands-on, collage-like process of erasure creates something that, to me, feels more like visual art .  You are working with a page from an already printed (and/or bound) text (that was, hopefully, in bad shape before you started tearing pages out). You can erase (i.e. cross out) the words you don't want to use in creating your new text, but you can't add words (ev...

Here's a brief slideshow of the lovely blur that was October and the release of The Book of Scented Things .   The Literary House launch party on October 7, 2014.   Me, reading my poem & talking about poetry. Editing discussion at the Arts Club of Washington on October 29, 2014. With Caroline Knuth, lovely poet-friend who came to the DC launch. It's been an amazing celebration of a month for our beloved anthology and both launch events were such fun. We were joined by contributors, friends, family, and even Chanel! Thank you to everyone who helped make these events so successful and thank you for welcoming The Book of Scented Things into the reading world.  Some other things that happened in October: The Book of Scented Things landed an amazing review by poet-perfumista Kathleen Rooney in The Chicago Tribune ! It ran in their dedicated books section, Printers Row Journal , on October 16. Jehanne and I attended our first Dodge Poetry Festi...