Friday, February 19, 2010

Verse Wisconsin acceptance!

Thanks to Duotrope, a wonderfully useful writer's tool, I've been submitting poetry lately. (Also thanks to Jane Banning, whose works I was searching for when I came across both Verse Wisconsin and Duotrope!) So far 14 poems to five different journals and out of three I've heard back from, one acceptance! Not bad for my first try in years! Verse Wisconsin is a print and online magazine that's been around since 1998, under the title Free Verse, they had to change it when they went online because another ezine had that name already. My poem was accepted for the Spring 2010 online version, which is themed "alternate realities"---who could resist that? Like I told them, my whole life is an alternate reality!

On that note, let me share with you Rainer Maria Rilke's incredible poem You who never arrived, which has to do with my poem; mine refers to the awful possibility that I had not met Jim....now if I could only express myself like Rilke..


You Who Never Arrived
by Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets
that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps
the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

from Theory.com.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Farewell to Kage Baker 1952-2010

I just found out writer Kage Baker passed away on Jan 31st. I am so sad I never got a chance to meet her; I've admired her work since her debut novel _In the Garden of Iden_ came out in 1997. I think I ran across it serendipitously at a bookstore, intrigued by the beautiful cover art and it led to a major Kage Baker addiction. The main character, the botanist Mendoza, remains one of my favorite female characters in science-fiction literature. All her books have been original, surprising, affecting, top-notch, never disappointing.
I will miss her...