Addendum 🐣
She's here!
Cicely Rose was born on April 10th, and she is healthy and happy and sweet as a peach. What a wonder! What a waiting! And how very worth it. I am confident to report after our three days' acquaintance, that she's consistently delightful, keen on eating, and is into music and her older siblings already. From her stint in utero I'd have said she's headed for a life in dance, but out here, she's been more reserved, soporific so far.
Thanks be to God.
And speaking of that God and that thanks, I've just come back from the MFA retreat on Whidbey where we had the writers Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (stupendous!), Bruce Beasley, and Susanne Paola Antonetta as guests. While there I had the opportunity to give some talks about the poet Adam Zagajewski which I may well write up into a kind of essay once the seas calm a bit. 🌊
Publications
The big news is this new essay in Image on the artist Preston Singletary. This piece was a labor of love, in part because I've known the Raven Cycle for so long and in part because I'm captivated by Singletary's vision for it. Still another part has to be that I wrote it for Image, which is the first place I sent poems to as a fledgling.
Whats more is they gave us the cover! I was hoping they would and didn't even know how to ask (so I didn't) but then BAM! I see the proofs and my are they stunning. Get this one in print if you can.
Buy copies of this striking issue here.
>Or just read my article here.
Remember how in that last newsletter I told you three poems had dropped and how I then proceeded to link to only two of them? Math isn't my forte, but counting to three really shouldn't be so trying. Here's the missing one, a poem about leaf-blowers and the resurrection of the dead. 🍃
Listening
I'm trying to like that Beths record everyone is talking about and I'm cautiously sampling BoyGenius (for my money, Better Oblivion Community Center is the best of Bridgers collabs by so far as to render these others moot. I like the idea of the project, I think, more than the project itself).
Call me 25 years too late, but I'm obsessing over Toad the Wet Sprocket these days. I liked them back when it was more appropriate to do so, but now I'm gaga over them, especially "Dulcinea." 🎧
As always, I'm listening to jazz and as usual, I'm mostly disappointed, but man is it worth it when I'm not.
Reading
I'm loving two books especially just now, and I'm about to be in a relationship with a third. Book of All Books by Robert Calasso (who wrote Tiepolo Pink, remember?) is a wonder of scholarship, interpretive grace, and economy. It's a march through Old Testament commentaries, which sounds about as exciting as writing a musical based on the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, but in the right hands...
The other one is Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell which is a biographic/hagiographic interpretive/casual scholarly appreciation of the poet John Donne. This is not, mind you, an appreciation I was lacking, but it is an entirely joyful piece of scholarship, which is not a phrase one gets often to say.
On deck: One Day You'll Thank Me by David McGlynn. I read the first three chapters so far and they're all charm and wisdom re: fatherhood, health, modern life.
Okay fam, thanks for all your support. I've got a little peanut to burp.