people, time is running out
January 25, 2008
Submit to Qarrtsiluni’s Hidden Messages issue by Jan. 31. Go. Do it.
the best news
January 24, 2008
I just found out one of my poems has been accepted for Boxcar Poetry Review. But that’s not the best news. I am keeping the best news to myself.
read write poem news
January 4, 2008
…deb has agreed to take over managing the project, which is wonderful news. Here’s a little bit about her:
Deb Scott first starting writing poetry while in the throes of angst-ridden pubescence. A long, long separation ensued until a professor recently reminded her of its power and beauty, first with Pablo Neruda and his “Ode to the Dictionary.” Her poetry has been published in MReview 2006 & 2007 and soon can be read in qarrtsiluni. She likes best to write poetry of place. Deb finds much inspiration from her childhood days in Arizona’s mountain-deserts and her Portland home in the great Pacific Northwest. She’s Read Write Poem’s manager and hopes this place encourages everyone who visits or participates — novice to expert — to read and write poetry. With wild and enthusiastic abandon.
Now go visit the site and wish her a warm welcome.
ceridwen is dead
January 4, 2008
I am back to blogging under my real name. The separation of my blogging identity from my real identity proved to be untidy. Of course, this means I will be password protecting all my personal posts, which means I will be password protecting most of my posts. Oh well. There’s a trade-off to everything, eh?
seriously, i had to resist the urge, several times …
January 2, 2008
… to call my mfa program and tell them i am too scared to go through with it.
I’m such a pussy.
I’ve never called myself a pussy before, and I think I have offended myself, as evidenced by the fact that I just flipped myself off at hearing me call myself a pussy. Then I got all into it with myself. Oh well, I’ll get over it. I never stay angry with myself for too long. I’ve called myself worse, for sure, and managed to work through it.
I had another poetry nightmare last night. I was moving back into the bedroom I grew up in. As I was unpacking all my thong underwear and poetry books — the only two types of items I appeared to be moving into the room — I realized that none of the books I’d ever read made any sense to me. I was a poetry poser. I woke up in a panic, and with a full bladder.
I’m halfway through Hazard Adam’s Offense of Poetry, and I have no comments about it yet. I just read Cynthia Cruz’ Ruin, and I found the poems to be stunning, so much so that I would poet stalk her if I were still doing that sort of thing.
Tomorrow, I am having dinner with a poet I really respect as a person and as a writer. I’m stoked. I never reach out to people in real life. Well, rarely. It might not sound like it, but going to dinner with her is a courageous act on my part.
I know, I’ve set the bar pretty low for myself in terms of what I am defining as courageous, haven’t I? I am taking small steps toward conquering my anxiety, or at least not letting it run/ruin my life. I refuse to get to the point that I just sit around at home all the time because I am too afraid to be near/with anyone or go anywhere. That’s not the life I see for myself, and it’s not the life I will have. So. Fucking. There.
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And for anyone who hasn’t seen it, Read Write Poem is up for grabs if anyone wants to run with it. If there are no takers by this weekend, I’m going to close down the site.
call for submissions to qarrtsiluni
January 1, 2008
I’m excited to announce the next theme for qarrtsiluni, which Carey Wallace and I are guest editing. Submissions are being accepted from today until Jan. 31. Here’s a description of the issue theme:
The world is full of hidden messages, real and imagined: the letter concealed in the stem of a pen, the meeting place coded into a newspaper ad, information sailors derive from the weather, destinies astrologers divine from the stars, art drawn on the walls of catacombs, the farmer who finds signs in the behavior of livestock, the teenager who hears joy or doom in the seemingly random order of radio songs, people speaking freely among strangers who don’t know their language, the vast distance between what is meant and what is said.
This issue of qarrtsiluni is interested in hidden messages: the ways they’re concealed, the moments they’re revealed. The “messages” we’ll collect for the issue can come in any form: poetry, story, painting, photograph, essay, fragment, memory, code, and, for the first time, film.
Does our world conceal a great secret, or is it always struggling to speak? What hidden messages have you found? What do you dream of finding? What messages have you concealed?
A hidden message is different from a secret: by definition, a message necessitates a recipient, an audience, a listener. In qarrtsiluni’s Hidden Messages issue, we want the qarrtsiluni community to become the discoverers and decoders of a new collection of hidden wisdom, confessions, beauty and truth.
(Oh, and have a happy new year.)
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster. — W.H. Auden
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
