Egads, where has the time went?! There’s micro-time, this week, wherein:

1. I drove to North Adams for a meeting,
2. have my reading tonight with Kim Rogers at the Green Street Café (which I am so excited about; that and the dinner provided — Green St. has an excellent menu!),
3. and tomorrow afternoon I’m visiting, in my capacity as local poet, a classroom of first-graders at the Smith College Campus School.

Add that to all my regular doings & whatnot with the boys, and that’s a pretty action-packed week for me.  The last item is of special note — I’m not altogether confident of being able to keep one 7 yr old’s interest, never mind a roomful of them.  I’m going to read them two poems from Hunger All Inside, “All Souls’” and “Night Visits”, and we’ll talk about Halloween and what a metaphor is.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

And, as if the reading tonight weren’t event enough, yesterday was Lance’s birthday.  He’s coming with me tonight, and our dinner will be our first without the kids since Aidan was born.  Our first night out together, alone.

Which brings me to macro-time, this year, which is almost over!  Too soon to start enumerating blessings etc., but oy! This year has slipped by me as sneakily as Vincent hiding a bread knife (a.k.a. his “sharp sword” which he needs to fight the “bad witches”) behind his back.  That Thanksgiving is a mere 2 weeks away, and you-know-what soon after, doesn’t even bear thinking about. Oy.

I’m drinking coffee at my desk.  The baby’s napping, Lance took Vincent for a walk. And I’ve just noticed a couple phrases Lance scrawled on the legal pad on my desk at some point in the last day or so: “Robust incoherence” and “transcendent vacuity”.

I don’t know if he was criticizing something himself or quoting someone else in awe, but, Ouch!

I have alway felt sympathy for the pain of a bad review, hoping in a vague amorphous way not to ever experience it myself, while also thinking, A scorching by M. Kakutani or W. Logan? I should be so lucky!

But now that I have a chapbook, which actual other people who are not my mother or husband or best friends are reading, I understand those writers who avoid reading reviews, a querulous mention in PW, or tart dismissal in the back section of Poetry.

(Though again, really, I should be so lucky.)

As a poet, I’m used to not being much remarked upon or noticed (and I’m not suggesting that will change). But what I’m coming to terms with now is the very tangible fact that when you publish a collection, not just a poem or two in journals but a pile of poems all together for compare-&-contrasting, people will have opinions about it.

Obviously. I know. And yet. When your focus is writing and publishing, getting your work out there, “out there” is far away, and you’re removed from what “out there” means: strangers, who may or may not think your work is shite.

So it’s a delightful surprise when someone out there reads your work, and likes it, and then tells other people about it, an unexpected peach: “Marvelous things will happen”: Thank you so much to Sandy Longhorn for her generous post about Hunger All Inside!   Sandy’s blog has turned me on to many other poets, she’s an abundace of poet-advocacy — I’m happy to have been noticed and noted so positively.  Lucky me!

This Thursday, November 5, at 7:30pm, the Collected Poets Series will present another full night with poets April Ossmann, Peter Waldor, and Pamela Stewart.

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009) and Contemporary Poetry of New England(UPNE, 2002). She has won several poetry awards, including the 2000 Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. She is a publishing, writing, and editing consultant (www.aprilossmann.com), and teaches poetry in private tutorials and at The Writer’s Center in White River Junction, VT. She has also taught at Lebanon College and the University of Maine at Farmington and was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000 -2008. She lives in Post Mills, VT.

Peter Waldor was born in Newark, New Jersey.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For the past twenty years Waldor has worked in the insurance business in northern New Jersey where he lives with his wife and three children. Waldor’s poetry has appeared in many magazines (both in print and on-line) such as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and Mothering Magazine. Waldor’s book of poetry, Door to a Noisy Room, was published by Alice James Books in January, 2008.

Pamela (Jody) Stewart was born in Boston. She received her BA from Goddard College ADP and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Among her publications are four poetry chapbooks and five full-length volumes of poems: The St. Vlas Elegies (L’Epervier Press, 1977), Cascades (L’Epervier Press, 1979), Nightblind (Ion Books/Raccoon, 1985), Infrequent Mysteries (Alice James Book, 1991), and The Red Window (University of Georgia Press, 1997). A chapbook, The Ghost Farm will be published by Pleasure Boat Studio in the spring of 2010. Jody has been included in the Pushcart Anthologies twice, won American Poetry Review’s first prize for Best Poems of 1980, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hawthorndon Fellowship and an MCC grant. She met her current husband Ed Cothey while traveling in Cornwall, UK. They returned to the States in 1990 to Hawley, MA and formed Tregellys Farm. Jody is working on a New and Selected volume.

For more information on the Collected Poets Series or this month’s poets, please visit our website.

Since we watched the first two seasons of the BBC series “Primeval” on DVD, the exclamation, “Oy! You!” has become a permanant addition to my lexicon.  I’d bet my books that not a single episode passes without the cute blonde zoologist, Abby, shouting this at least once.  It’s very endearing.  (Early episodes also inevitably included gratuitous shots of her barely-clad bottom as she padded around her flat in her undies, but those seemed to have tapered off by season two.)

Far better than other outbursts you might hear in our household, “Oy!” has become my go-to phrase of choice.  It’s quite versatile; a note up or down changes your tone from mild annoyance to I’ve-had-it-up-to-here!

Last night it was, “Oy! Would you look at that?”

Lance and Vincent carved a big pumpkin.  When asked if he wanted a scary or a friendly pumpkin, Vincent said, “Scary.”

Lance got to work — Vincent’s only real contributions were as critic and occasional picker-upper of a seed or two.  He did spontaneously strip off his shirt, but when asked to put his hand in and clean out the guts, he said, “Oh no, I’m too little.  Daddy will do that.”  Oy.

In the end, however, Daddy did too good of a job.  When he finished, lit the candles, and turned off the lights, the ta-da moment was interrupted by the sound of Vincent sobbing.

The Great Pumpkin scares the bejeezus out of Vincent.

“It’s too scary! It’s too scary, Daddy!”

Oy.

Not that I disagree entirely.  That’s one freaky pumpkin.

As I was putting Aidan in his pajamas, I heard Vincent rummaging in the silverware drawer. (Don’t talk to me about child-proofing. We did, our drawers are child-proofed.  Vincent conquered the contraptions in 3 weeks.)  When I went to check on him, he was about to deface the pumpkin with a butter knife:  he wants to add a second nose between its eyes, quite reasonably explaining that this will solve the whole “too scary” conundrum.

He’s not wrong.  But I still confiscated the knife. Oy!

I’m tired, still recovering from my run-in with the new world pandemic (though everlastingly grateful to have apparently not infected the boys), and cannot imagine spending one more minute on this poem this week.  I have no perspective on its worth at all right now, just hope it’s worth reading:

{poof!}

My second reading this week, this time without the 3-ring circus of my kids, was super.  Some friends who’d never been to a poetry reading before came, so it was fun to introduce them to the experience and demonstrate that it’s not that scary after all.  And I enjoyed the mix of themes and styles that resulted by reading with Kim Rogers.  (We’re doing it again in November, this time as part of the Green Street Poetry Series in Northampton.)  AND I sold a few chapbooks, to people I don’t even know, which is new and different and wild.

But all that public contact came at a price.  Starting to feel better today, definitely didn’t catch the worst flu bug around, but being sick and still having to be the mama doesn’t leave me room for anything else at the end of the day.  Especially when the kids zero in on my weakness and cling ever more, my pint-size personal Chinese handcuffs.

With a lot of luck I’ll complete a new poem this weekend along with some books.  And maybe that will prove to be not so far out of the realms of reality as it sounds.  Rain days are good for hunkering down and getting things done and we’re experiencing a monsoon of rain this weekend — some editor of some journal once said that every time it rained he’d end up with a slush pile of rain poems for days thereafter. So I guess the key is not not writing a rain poem, but holding on to it for a while and submitting it during a heat wave, when rain will seem like nirvana.

What a whirlwind of a weekend!

Even though I was tethered to a table all day Saturday during the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I had a grand time.  Unlike some literary festivals where folks ignore the book tables in droves, MassPo is all about poetry & poets, and poets love books, so I was able to chat with a number of interesting people, including

• one poet who read a blog post I wrote last year about enjoying her book — what a thrill that was! I always think I’m sending these posts into the ether, so it never fails to surprise me when their subjects come upon them!  Which then makes me wish I had written more cogent & detailed posts re: my admiration in the first place.
• two poets I know & admire from their blogs & ReadWritePoem — meeting online friends in person can be a gamble, but Carolee & Jill were every bit as wonderful & generous face to face as they are electronically.  I hope we can meet up again before too long.
• Joan Houlihan, who is a HOOT!  I adore her.

Now I have to wait an entire year for the festival to come back around again…hopefully next October I’ll be able to participate a bit more.

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Also this weekend, last night in fact, was my chapbook release party.  Wow.  I’m so thankful for the nice crowd of good friends that came out on a cold & wet autumn night at the tail end of a busy weekend to help me celebrate.  And I’m grateful it was a patient crowd:  I brought the boys for this first big event, and that added quite the element of unpredictability to the poetry reading!  I’m pretty sure none can say they’ve ever been to a reading like this one before…and nor will they ever again.  Look for some photographs of this singular evening soon, right here, and you’ll see what I mean!  Too bad I didn’t think to have the reading filmed for posterity — with Aidan & Vincent’s assistance, it was, um, quite a night.

In the meantime, I have another reading this Wednesday night, with the ferociously talented Kimberley Ann Rogers…this time sans children.  Because we all could use a night off from time to time.

According to their website, 178 poets and presenters are reading, leading workshops or performing at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival this coming weekend, with simultaneous launches all over the state.  There’s a High School Poets Program, a huge slate of workshops, many many readings — and it’s free!

If you’re attending on Saturday, come look me up.  I’ll be at the Small Press Fair, staffing the Tupelo Press table –stop by, say hi, and buy a book or three.

Please note, they’re encouraging all Saturday attendees to check in at Festival Central, and everyone who does will be entered in a raffle. The Poetry Box, according to the website, will contain:

• A gift certificate from Grub Street entitling you to attend one of their courses.
• A gift certificate to attend one session with PoemWorks and Barbara Helfgott Hyett.
• A gift certificate from Grolier’s in Harvard Square.
• An assortment of poetry books.

Free books?  I don’t need to be asked twice!  There is just an outrageous number of events happening — I hope you’re able to participate. This is the only the second year of the Festival, and this year’s even more ambitious, so here’s hoping it’s wildly successful and sure to return for years to come.

And to whet your whistle, ReadWritePoem, in partnership with the Festival, is running a special series, wherein featured readers at the Festival were asked to answer the question, “What is poetry?”  The results are as varied and intriguing as the poets: a wordle from Joan Houlihan, a pastiche of quotes & frank ruminations from Jeffrey Harrison.  Take a gander, and offer your own thoughts, too — no grades allowed, but class participation is highly encouraged.

Have I ever neglected my blog this long before?  Apologies!  At last I have my beloved iBook back — well, a refurbished clone of my beloved, actually, but it will most certainly do — and I’m so backed up and behind that I’m simply choking out here in the weeds.

It was an interesting couple weeks without a computer.  I didn’t care for it.  I read some novels I’d been meaning to read (The Magicians — enjoyable, despite the protagonist being a bit of a whiner; The Codex — same author, also fun, again despite a lackluster protagonist; The Anthologist – I loved this: the poet-curmudgeon-narrator really grew on me, the po-biz barbs were well-shot, and Baker has some true insights into form; now reading Freddy & Fredericka, which I resisted, though I love Mark Helprin, because I have a hard time sympathizing with privileged characters, but I’m glad I gave in because I’m being swept up).

And of course I read tons of poetry (Tupelo’s fall books, so different from each other, are so great in their various ways: Pat Fargnoli’s Then, Something gorgeously meditative, Joan Houlihan’s The Us strange, new, yet accessible, and the lush language of Jennifer Militello’s Flinch of Song).

So far, so good.  However, being cut off from my computer meant being cut off from my poems, all the things I hadn’t yet printed out in hard copies, my manuscript-in-process, the revisions I was working on.  In short, my writing was stymied.  I didn’t write a single new poem during my sojourn in laptop-limbo.  No Draft of the Week this week, I’m afraid.

That said, I still shuffled around with the print-out of the MS I had, and came up with an organization and order and even section breaks that please me, and spent most of last night working on the computer adjusting the file, and just printed out the new version a little while ago.  Flipping through it in its little black spring binder, table of contents and all, is almost as delicious as my chocolate birthday cake.

Yes, I’m a year older now, with vastly more wrinkles.  The sweetest, smilingest part of the day: the boys’ birthday card to me, as dictated by Vincent and transcribed by Lance: “Happy Birthday to the best old Mommie we’ve ever had.  We’re going to share your birthday cake.”  And we did.

Lastly, if you’ve been waiting and wondering, I just received word tonight:  Hunger All Inside shipped today! So look for your copies to arrive in the mail next week — hooray!  If you didn’t order and would like to, you can either go here to order from Finishing Line Press, or contact me directly at mgauthier [dot] hunger [at] gmail [dot] com.  That goes also if you’d like an autographed copy.  I’ve picked out a proper writing implement and am practicing my signature even as I type…

This Thurday at 7:30pm we’re kicking off our third season of the Collected Poets Series with two amazing poets: Annie Finch and Lisa Olstein.

Annie Finch is the author or editor of fifteen books of poetry, translation, and criticism. Her books of poetry include Eve, Calendars, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, and the forthcoming Among the Goddesses: A Narrative Libretto. Her music, art, and theater collaborations include two operas. Her poems appear in anthologies, textbooks, and journals including Agni, Fulcrum, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review, and her books on poetics include A Formal Feeling Comes, An Exaltation of Forms, The Ghost of Meter, The Body of Poetry, and the forthcoming A Poet’s Craft. Annie’s book of poetry, Calendars, was shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award and in 2009 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award. Annie lives in Maine where she directs Stonecoast, the low-residency MFA program of the University of Southern Maine.

Lisa Olstein is the author of Lost Alphabet (Copper CanyonPress, 2009), Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award. Cold Satellite, an album of songs based on her poems and lyrics, is forthcoming from singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. A contributing editor of jubilat, with Dara Wier and Noy Holland, Lisa co-founded the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts & Action at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is Associate Director of MFA Program for Poets and Writers.

For more information on the Collected Poets Series, please visit our website.  And don’t miss this first reading of what promises to be another exciting year!

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Note: As I’ll be without a laptop to call my own until early next week, attending NEIBA in Hartford on Saturday, in addition to the CPS reading above, if you’ve sent me an email, please be patient while I scramble for the means of accessing the interwebs.