After the rain

I wanted to lose myself in books. Because the day began with rain, I felt no guilt in this retreat. But then the sun blazed through the clouds and it became difficult to justify my languor.

Writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal knows this feeling, too:

Rainy Day

Rain is your pass to stay inside, to retreat. It’s cozy and safe, hanging out on this side of the gray. But then the sun comes out in the afternoon, and there’s disappointment, even fear, because the world will now resume, and it expects your participation. People will get dressed and leave their houses and go places and do things. Stepping out into the big, whirling, jarringly sunny world — a world that just a few minutes was so confined and still and soft and understated, and refreshingly gloomy — seems overwhelming.

— from Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

House of words

Always an advocate for making art and poetry part of the everyday experience, I am delighted to discover Poem House. Jeff Goodby, a California visual and media artist, has transformed a stately Victorian home into evocative, working, installation art.

(And thanks to artist Tracy Weil for sharing this word-art creation with me).

Submission Season

It’s autumn, officially.

Unofficially, it’s submission season. This time each year literary journals open their gates to accept a flood of poems and stories from hopeful writers.

It’s the best of times (publication!) and the most trying of times (rejection!). Lots of hurry, lots of wait.

I like poet Bruce Cohen’s take on the submission process. It’s funny, telling and true:

I wish I could tap together my ruby red L.L. Bean slippers and post questions to a Wizard of Oz Poetry Editor so I could unravel the esoteric truths and mysteries about what factors, what esthetics, he really considers when deciding whether or not to accept my poems, what the deal breakers are. . . .

Read the full essay (from Rattle, Spring 2009) here.

150 books

In celebration of Oregon's sesquicentennial anniversary, Poetry Northwest and the Oregon State Library have named 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books — one for each year of statehood. The hefty list was created with input from poetry readers across the state.

Featuring a mix of established and emerging writers, the list is an impressive show of poetic range. Poetry, it seems, is family-friendly, with blood and love lines threading the directory: father and son William and Kim Stafford; brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman; and husband and wife Ralph Salisbury and Ingrid Wendt.

It's a powerful endeavor, both creating the roster and reading the books, and I'm happy to recognize some of my favorites (Toluca Street by Maxine Scates; Here, Bullet by Brian Turner), and to add the others to my growing list of must-reads.

How about you? Have you read all 150? What are your favorites? Are there missing teeth in this ambitious compilation? I'm eager to know what you think.

Go here for the Oregon 150 Poetry Book List.

Words drop away

Some people say that the best stories have no words. . . . It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

I know that. But I know something else, too . . . Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

— from Lighthousekeeping, a novel by Jeanette Winterson