More reading, less writing

Some days I feel like I'm drowning in poems and pieces of poems. I'm realizing that I need to step away from poem-a-day-type exercises (like the ones I sometimes do at Once Daily as Directed and the Poetic Asides blog) and concentrate on other things. Revising, for example, which is about the hardest thing for me to do.

Or reading. I used to think that the poets I was meeting were terrible name droppers. Some of them are. That said, I think that part of that idea came from the fact that, for the most part, only poets know other poets, so if someone like Alicia Ostriker or Adrian Blevins is going to become famous somewhere, it's among others of her or his own kind.

Many poetry books--and I'm speaking here, for the most part, of the sort of book that was published as a book-length collection by its author, not a "Collected Works Of"-type thing--are fairly slender. It seems to me that I ought to be able to manage to read a poetry book per week, at least for a while.

So I'm planning to get a stack of such books going and then go through them. I'll probably yammer about them here, in a highly non-lit-crit way. If you've got any book suggestions, please add them to the comments.

Colors, the colors, man...

This note is to remind myself to fix the colors in this blog. I think they're the reason that some of my text is disappearing.

Strike!

I've just had a poem accepted for issue 90 of Short, Fast, and Deadly.

How Public, Like a Blog

I'm not sure what this is going to be yet. I guess I'm seeing a need for what in the Dark Ages was called a "home page." I've never really wanted a "this is me" page; I've created pages for specific projects or archives or pursuits.

I guess that this one is about poetry in the same way that I'm about poetry.

Go to 6935 Laurel Avenue, Takoma Park, Maryland. Face the door. Turn right. Walk to the alley/driveway on the left. Follow it until the area opens out into a parking lot. Walk about 20 feet. Look left. This is where that photo, above, was taken. I'm going to guess that it's spring 1962 and that the baby is about 14 months old. Does that sound right? I don't know babies.

We lived in the building in the background. Apartments up, Park Pharmacy down. Later, Park Pharmacy moved, so the reference points are a bit messed up.

Say you're reading this and you're looking for a poetry prompt. Type your oldest address that you can remember into Google. Go to street view. If you find your house, what would you see now if you were looking out from its front door?