I am delighted to announce that Longhouse has published a new chaplet of haiku poems, nearly invisible, that spans 2003-2010 and poems written in Boston, Seattle, Peterborough, Port Townsend and Taiwan.

Forthcoming reviews of Adamantine are slated for publication in Denver Quarterly and Zen Monster.

Thank you to Kimberly Becker for interviewing me for Eclectica.

Graceland

We went to Graceland.



To see how Elvis lived.



It was very yellow.


With lots of texture:


Including shag:

I am very pleased to announce that I am now represented by The Lecture Bureau: http://www.thelecturebureau.com/speakers/shin_yu_pai.html

Adamantine reviewed in the New Pages.

a poem on bears

mountain uncle

were you a god

your vital fluids
would turn to poison
killing those that would
drink of your bile

mountain spirit
ursa major
crescent moon

bear drained of bile
from a gall bladder
milked of medicine

cold & bitter – uncloud
an old woman’s eyes, dissolving
stones, arrest the body

from convulsion, cure
the temper of patriarchs
by clearing the liver of fire

in forests, colliers still
revere you, cover wood
in mud & brick, burning

branches until turned
to carbon, porous
light, transmuted

the artist roughs out your form
in charcoal, the alchemical,
dear animal-uncle



* The ethereal fluid that is the Greek gods’ blood.

Renewed reading interests

I've resolved to read more poetry, within my specific field of interest - in part to renew my own commitments and to imagine a more emancipatory poetic project. Finished reading this week Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave (TinFish, 2010). This is a thoughtful and reflective collection that contemplatives the invisible and forgotten histories of Portland, Oregon - via the histories of its minority populations which experienced unspeakable violence - the internment of Japanese-Americans and the deaths of African American laborers caused by poor urban planning and flooding.

Sand includes in the collection an interesting meditation on POD structures, wooden shipping containers, that post-Katrina have developed into temporary/emergency housing structures. When Kort and I left Dallas for Boston in 2001, we shipped our belongings to Brookline in a standard POD that was deposited in front of our apartment building on Beacon Street. We unloaded it and it sat on the street for a week before it was removed. I don't know if it was removed by the city, or the POD people - but in that week that it sat occupying prime parking, we heard people slam in and out of the structure, found trash and other debris, and the space took on quite a social life of its own. Sand's book caused me to think quite a bit and I have picked up her guerrilla poetics book with her husband Jules Boykoff who's research in politics interests me.

Over the years, my reading interests have seemed to focus more on prose, unless I'm in the process of reviewing a poetry collection. I'm reading poetry much more selectively now and hope to read a book of poems every week. A reasonable goal.

Last Sunday, we got together for brunch with friends and talked about individual new year's resolutions. Our friends Jim and Pamela approach the idea of making resolutions for the new year in terms of giving up 3 things and inviting or welcoming 3 new things into their life. Makes sense - to make room for the new, we must clear out some of the old. Jim is giving up frustration - a good quality to renounce.

Three things I aspire to give up:
- grudges
- over-attachment
- sloth

Three things I welcome:
- renewed health
- joy
- new life, in whatever form

I was featured this past week on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day website.

The poem is also available through the Poem Flow i-phone app.