Sharon Needles Wins!

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-rupauls-drag-race-finale,0,2716191.story But what was that thing she was wearing on her forehead?

Happy Earth Day

Remember to love your mother today (Mother Earth, that is!).

For Earth Day, Dean and I have been spending the lovely sunny weekend tending our garden. So satisfying to be getting our hands dirty, digging and planting and weeding and pruning. Almost nothing could be better . . . .

I love this poem from Poem a Day, and what it says about language, and memory-- as well as the nod to WCW.


Untitled [A house just like his mother's]
by Gregory Orr

A house just like his mother's,
But made of words.
Everything he could remember
Inside it:
Parrots and a bowl
Of peaches, and the bright rug
His grandmother wove.

Shadows also—mysteries
And secrets.
Corridors
Only ghosts patrol.
And did I mention
Strawberry jam and toast?

Did I mention
That everyone he loved
Lives there now,

In that poem
He called "My Mother’s House?"



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RIP Adrienne Rich

Wow. End of an era. End of an era. So sad. so sad.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Poet Adrienne Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.

Rich died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s.

Through her writing, Rich explored topics such as women’s rights, racism, sexuality, economic justice and love between women.

Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems “Diving into the Wreck” in 1974. In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection “The School Among the Ruins.”

She had first gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” in 1963. Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that she “proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman — a member of the second sex.”

I was looking up the calories/carbs in a Wendy's Doublestack, and found this. Read the full report (table format) It is too funny:

Sex Calories – Results of Dr. Wieder’s Calories Burned by Sex Study


Following are the results of Dr. Robert S. Wieder’s exhaustive study of the average calories burned during sex activities of various kinds, as published in the American Journal of Exercise Calorimetry in August 2006. Dr. Weider’s research supercedes the energy expenditure figures in the Compendium of Physical Activities, last updated in 1993. As authoritative as the Compendium is, the detail of its data for sex calories per hour is lacking: only three values are given for different levels of exertion for general sexual activities. By comparison, the Compendium lists 12 detailed values for calories burned by forestry activities, including “barking trees.” Dr. Weider’s research has remedied these shortcomings.

A Face to Meet the Faces Anthology reading!

Hope to see you there! It's a really wonderful anthology, almost 400 pages of Persona Poems, written from a variety of perspectives and points of view.

Readers include Luke Johnson, Matthew Nienow, Kathleen Flenniken, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, Marge Manwaring, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and others. Wednesday night, April 4th. 7 pm Richard Hugo House.

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Also:
Monday April 2nd at 7pm Elliot Bay Books

Kathleen Flenniken and Martha Collins!

Visiting poet Martha Collins, the author of numerous collections and for many years an esteemed professor at Oberlin, and Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken, an editor with Floating Bridge Press and the newly named Poet Laureate of Washington, read together this evening from new books. For Martha Collins, it's White Papers (University of Pittsburgh Press). "White Papers is praise song for the truth. It bravely pulls back the covers of whiteness to offer us precious views of racial privilege. Martha Collins has laid bare the more complex dangers of America's central trauma in a book of innovative craft and startling honesty." – Afaa Michael Weaver. Kathleen Flenniken's Plume (University of Washington Press), newest volume in the UW Press' Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and her second, full-length book, draws on her unusual (for a poet) background as a civil engineer and hydrologist, one who worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. "moving deftly between haunting lyric and disturbing documentary, Kathleen Flenniken packages recent history in a wide variety of poetic forms and styles. Plume raises the bar for documentary poetry, moving us with its timely and important subject matter as well as the meticulous craft of its poems." – Martha Collins.

I like this poem from today's Verse Daily!


Where the Hero Speaks to Others
       
Dear mailbox. I have abandoned the task. There is no more glory
to resurrect, spoils of the marriage to pick over. She finds me burdensome and has moved out into the guest house.
I don't remember building a guest house.
Many nights I have stumbled out into the unwilling streets and fallen
to my knees before you. O, mailbox. Your throat is swollen
and refuses to sing for me. You no longer bring me news of a timeshare abroad
which I might consider. You draw up from your long, black stomach papers
I will not sign. O, lamplight.
You are equally no friend. Beside you I deliver a monologue
correcting previous scholars about the usefulness of tulips. O, useless tulip.
There is so much I want to say to you when grinning, you mock me
for watching you from the window. I feel ashamed
for wanting you. For sitting quietly in a chair especially
to miss her. O, musty library flooded with sun. To rub her name
from the faces of your books.


-- Wendy Xu

Sarah Palin's Secret Plot to Capture the White House in 2012

I thought this was a fascinating, well-thought out article on Huff post, written by Geoffrey Dunn, suggesting that Sarah Palin may try to steal the Republican nomination at a brokered convention (or run as a third party?)

"In the aftermath of Santorum's sweep of Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, a brokered GOP convention is a very real possibility. The Republican Party has become a fractured mosaic of fringe constituencies -- from Tea Partiers to evangelical anti-abortion activists, from libertarians who support Ron Paul to white supremacists who despise the fact that there is a black man in the White House. It is an unruly lot. The days of a GOP elite framing the presidential selection process are over. Charisma trumps experience; celebrity trumps substance; and, perhaps most disturbingly, anger trumps reason. Mama grizzlies, especially those who have been wounded, don't go down easy."

Check it out here: www.huffingtonpost.com

I love this poem from today's poem a day, and the way it explores the word "economy."


Economy
by Sandra Beasley

After you've surrendered to pillows
and I, that second whiskey,
on the way to bed I trace my fingers
over a thermostat we dare not turn up.
You have stolen what we call the green thing—
too thick to be a blanket, too soft to be a rug—
turned away, mid-dream. Yet your legs
still reach for my legs, folding them quick
to your accumulated heat.
                              These days
only a word can earn overtime.
Economy: once a net, now a handful of holes.
Economy: what a man moves with
when, even in sleep, he is trying to save
all there is left to save.



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Dems Owe Rush a Thank You Gift. Of Sex.

This editorial from Huff post was just a hoot - offering to award Rush Limbaugh with a special cache of Viagra:

"I'd like to clarify here that in no way do I mean to suggest that Mr. Limbaugh is a sex tourist. I'm simply saying it because it sounds good. And anyway, it's not personal or anything. And furthermore, I apologize."

see full story here: link

Hugo House Poetry Class

This sounds like a fantastic class. Elizabeth is a terrific poet, and teacher. Check it out!


Poetry: The Practice of Revision. Wednesdays from 7 to 9p March 14 to May 23 (no class May 16). Registration is open online at Richard Hugo House or via phone at (206) 322-7030.
$360 general public/$324 Hugo House members.
·        
Class description: You’ve got a first draft. Now what? How do you revise toward a richer, more compelling poem? We’ll work with a variety of craft elements including image, music and form in order to develop strong, flexible tools for revision. We’ll wrestle with the distinction between mystery and confusion, and experiment with making bolder, riskier choices. In-class exercises, take-home assignments and and reading will prompt you to dismantle and re-assemble draft poems with gusto and a sense of inquiry. You’ll leave with a clearer sense of your own aesthetic and tools to sustain your development as a writer. Required books: Next Word, Better Word, by Stephen Dobyns and Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
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Elizabeth Austen is the author of “Every Dress a Decision” (Blue Begonia Press, 2011), and the chapbooks “The Girl Who Goes Alone” (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and “Where Currents Meet” (part of the Toadlily Press quartet Sightline). Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She was the Washington state “roadshow poet” and is the literary producer for KUOW 94.9 public radio. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles, and was part of the 2009 Hugo House Literary Series.More info at elizabethausten.wordpress.com/.

I love this poem from Poem a Day. And such sweetness and light, from Ezra Pound, of all people!


Come My Cantilations
by Ezra Pound

Come my cantilations,
Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them,
Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind,
Let me be free of pavements,
Let me be free of the printers.
Let come beautiful people
Wearing raw silk of good colour,
Let come the graceful speakers,
Let come the ready of wit,
Let come the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting.
We speak of burnished lakes,
And of dry air, as clear as metal.


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Having a great time in Palm Springs. Not quite as sunny as we had hoped. But lovely to see friends, and the Mid-Century Modern homes, and Tennis and golf and spa places. Tomorrow we'll go to Joshua Tree. And Monday, Bingo at the Ace with Linda! Fun fun!


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WA Poet Laureate!

Yay Kathleen!

State names Richland native its poet laureate for 2012-14

This past week, Kathleen Flenniken, a Richland native and Washington State University alumna, was named Washington's poet laureate for 2012-14. She lives in Seattle with her husband and has three children.
full story here

Class Warfare? Get Real.

I love this quote from Al Franken, that I read in the current issue of The Sun:

"In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not."

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This video about texters is too funny! Enjoy . . .

GAY MARRIAGE PASSES IN WA STATE!

Yee-haw. Goin' to the chapel and we're . . . gonna get married . . . !

(Probably not, but it's fun to know we could if we wanted)

Cheers!

from the web:

On February 1, the Washington State Senate voted to approve SB 6239, the marriage equality legislation, by a vote of 28-21. Your senator, Adam Kline , voted with the majority to grant loving, committed same-sex families equal civil marriage in the Evergreen State. Please send Sen. Kline a thank you right now by clicking here. 

The senate was considered by most observers as the more difficult chamber to pass the legislation through. Without Sen. Kline 's support, advocates would have failed to make Washington State the 7th in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

With the State House expected to vote on the measure in the coming days, it's time to take a moment to recognize the courage and conviction your senator took for standing up and doing the right thing. Thank Sen. Kline today!

Thank you,



Marty Rouse
National Field Director

P.S. Save the Date! Join us in Olympia on February 16th for Washington United’s