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.

Please help the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival

At the end of the year, pre-tax season, my inbox is filled with capital requests from presses, nonprofits, and organizations whom I don't remember signing up for. These are hard economic times. And so, I repost a worthwhile request from friends at the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival. Please support the festival and/or the publication of the Forget the Words anthology.

Subject: Support for the poetry festival at year's end!

A short note at the end of 2010 to ask you to consider a contribution to the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival, the next to be held this coming March 10-13.

Enpuku-ji/Centre Zen de la Main organizes the festival and, as a registered charity, is able to issue tax receipts for Canadian gifts.

You can contribute via CanadaHelps by following this link, choosing "Donate Now", and choosing the "Zen Poetry Festival Fund". CanadaHelps will provide your downloadable 2010 tax receipt.

You can also contribute to the publishing of our festival collection, forget the words!, and receive copies of our past collection, broadsides, tickets to the upcoming festival and more, by following this link to our on-line Indiegogo page.

For our American and European friends of the festival, we would like to send you either a lovely broadside or a book of poems of past or future invitees for a contribution of $100 or more.

Thank you for taking a moment to read this on the last day of the year. Really, any day is a fine one for supporting this unusual niche festival and we appreciate the support we have received in the past and that which will come.

Warmest wishes for the new year,
Myokyo

It's the last day of 2010 and the last day of vacation. I resolve to reclaim this space in 2011 and say more, or to say less more, etc.

After 7 years of booking my own readings, I've decided to reach out to a few speaker bureaus and a solidify a partnership in the new year so that I no longer negotiate my own reading contracts. Promoting a book is time-consuming work - I'd just as soon spend that energy on writing, cooking, or doing nothing. Think less about the writing business and get on with life.

I did not get any writing done over winter break. There were good reasons for it. I read Norman Schaefer's new book and wished that I could write poems like Norman. Today, Lisa Gill's Dark Enough arrived. I revisited several White Pine titles to help a friend develop a container garden display for the Northwest Garden and Flower show and had the delightful occasion to contemplate the microcosm and space of a container garden as a field of elegance and refinement, akin to a bonsai tree or Japanese rock garden. I hope to build some poetry gardens in the future - branch out into living environments, much like a hero, Robert Irwin.

Planning two trips in the spring to Boulder - to attend two 1-week residencies for the Naropa authentic leadership program. Short trip in early February to DC for AWP, and to Seattle in March for 8 days. My criteria for a vacation used to be the proximity to a beach. But there is nothing I'd like better than to chill in the PNW. And technically there are beaches.

This time of year, I get reflective and often compile elaborate lists of goals and resolutions for the impending year. This year, on the heels of a visit with my parents who visited last week - my thoughts turn to the following: that a purpose in life might be framed around removing suffering and making life better for others.

That said, there are unwritten lists and the childhood BF in Austin and I unhatch plans that our husbands would likely balk at or question if they knew the nature of such plannings. Perhaps we will resume our blog swapping.

Out of the tiger year and into the rabbit. The year of my birth totem. May 2011 and the rabbit bring balance, renewed energy, and deep connection to our best and brightest being.

New Poem

meow meow kitty kitty death rattle

we don’t know
why you died –
that morning

Kort saw you
steal into the yard
meow meow kitty cat –

death rattle buzz
of flies swarming
around your corpse

when we came home
that day gaseous spasms
jerking a life

force, I stood over
your body watching
nerves refire, remembering

how sound is the last
sense to go
before passing

After All This Time

I had to take a break from this blog to reconsider what I wanted this space to be. I will continue to make posts on a limited basis. Thank you for dropping by.

Some recent news:

Adamantine reviewed by Stephen Sohn for the Lantern Review.

Rigoberto Gonzalez engages with Adamantine on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass here.

Poet and blogger Djelloul Marbrook offers his reading of Adamantine here.

Trailer for ADAMANTINE

Coming soon:

after helping the giant
spider back outside, I lock
the kitchen door

discards

(after viewing Deborah Luster’s unpublished tintypes from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana)

a question of sentence:
events marked w/
occasioned images
happy holiday
happy Mardi Gras
happy Easter
happy Samhain

a question of locution:
OG Bump
Lone Outlaw
Thug Life
In Memory of Mom
a question of surface:
tattoo-scrawled torso
torched surfaces
dodging & burn
seared cicatrix

a question of constitution:
St. Andrew’s cross modeled
after hoe & rake, art historical
sigils to civil wars
Christ’s Last Supper
his final meal

a question of value:
dull blacks, faded whites
flattened tiers of grey

This blog was silent for a few months and now that I am out of Texas, I feel that I can put the last few months behind me. In March, I received a death threat email at my inbox at the Wittliff Collections. Though it was sent anonymously, the content of the message aligned itself with our confederate neighbors in our apartment complex, with the stars and bars on their balcony next door. The message was sent to make sure that we would move out at the end of May when our lease term expired.

We were out of town traveling when the threat came in and returned to Texas to file a police report. An investigation ensued which tracked the offending email down to a public computer terminal at UCLA, in the School of Management. The trail went cold there and our local dick, "Poorboy," announced to me via voice mail message that he was closing the case. The details of the email revealed too much to be just a random threat - it knew too much about the specifics of the situation and created a tenuous living situation where I wasn't sure if I was being cyberstalked or followed to work. I took down this blog temporarily and started thinking much more carefully about my own personal privacy and safety.

So when what appears to be a fantastic job opportunity came open in Arkansas and we had a chance to leave Texas - we accepted. I am spending June and July writing and traveling and start work in August.

Adamantine is moving along with production. Ran into some trouble with the art work I'd originally chosen for the cover - a Keith Carter image which he graciously agreed to have reproduced for the book. Unfortunately, Christian Wiman published a Copper Canyon book of essays in 2008 which used the same image, which I discovered while walking around the AWP bookfair in Denver last month. So I hunted around for alternatives and discovered the work of Chinese-Canadian photographer Elaine Ling and felt myself drawn to her photograph of the Atacama stone - the same subject that Carter photographed, but with a different spin. The presence of the graffiti on the desert sculpture makes the piece feel less ancient, more modern... which brings an interesting and perhaps more accurate framing of the poems within the book.