Or more like: thoughts on beginning the new year.
(1) Well, I've been lagging on the formatting of my contributors' more formalistically challenging poems for OCHO, which, by the way, will be available via Amazon, as a book and in Kindle version. I am deathly afraid of fucking up on n-spaces, for lack of a better term, in Nathaniel Mackey's poems; these n-spaces seem to want to change when changing fonts and then when converting MS Word document into pdf. So there's that.
I have selected the cover art, painted by visual artist Juan Carlos Quintana, and am just waiting for a high resolution jpg from him.
(2) I am now starting to think on my Adrian Castro essay, which, this month, I will be submitting to the Latino Poetry Review (currently a blog project but I understand an actual website is forthcoming). I've looked over my old blog posts on Castro's Cantos to Blood and Honey, and I have an almost complete essay there, needing only some poem citations, and some making a bit more formal my generally casual or colloquial blog language.
I think I am better off focusing on this one book; I'd thought of doing a write up on both of Castro's works, but I think that might be too ambitious, given my deadline. Though I'd previously blogged about his second collection, Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time, I don't believe I really critically engaged it at the time, and that my comments were mostly immediate, off the cuff responses which remained mostly intuitive and unsubstantiated. Not to say there is no value in these off the cuff intuitive responses, but in my practice, these types of responses are the starting points to the deeper critical engagements.
(3) On my forthcoming poetics e-journal. It's in the works, and the (e)conversations I am having are really very interesting. Here are some things: an e-journal edited and/or curated by a poet who is a part-time educator perhaps means that my pool of writers and readers will also most likely be other poets and educators, and most likely poets and educators with some kind of e-presence or e-tendencies, and hopefully students of poetry who are looking for ways to open up the texts for themselves.
(4) And finally, The Always Humble Never Neutral 2007 Blogging Awards! in which Ernesto Priego awards this here blog with "The This Is What I Mean By Poetry Blogging Award," to which I say Yay! And thank you for noticing this, Ernesto.
(5) Now. Onto more culinary adventures with mah husband. See you all in 2008.
