Slow Readings

Have a gander at the Canarium books website and check out their new "Slow Readings" feature. You'll find some familiar names there, and once name missing--

Jordan Davis begins his reading of Michael Morse's poem with "A divorce is..." and my absence from Canary-land feels not so much like a divorce but...more like the spouse who steps out to buy cigarettes and doesn't come back. Though, no, not nearly as abrupt as that. One day I noticed that The Canary was no longer and Canarium sprung up in its place with a new masthead. I wish them well and look forward to the books they'll publish this year. Of course I don't know WHO they're publishing, but I'm sure it will be good, interesting work.

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Canary involvement for me began in the Spring of 2002--what became/was my watershed poetry year for a number of reasons--when I received and email from a man I didn't know, a man who was in Honduras, or Nicaragua, a man who was starting a literary journal, a literary journal that was to showcase, in its first issue, local writers. How he got my name or pegged me as a "local writer," I don't know. I never asked. I suggested we meet for coffee--and so we did some weeks later. It was at Espresso Roma, less than two blocks from where I sit and type this, that I first met Josh Edwards. We both had beards. He was wearing a trucker hat and I don't think he was being ironic. He showed me the nearly finished manuscript of what would become The Canary River Review (the one and only number under that guise). He also showed me a manuscript of his own work. That spring I fell in love in a weird impossible sort of way--that's in there too. That summer I wrote most of what would become my first (and still unpublished) book. I was writing every day, reading poems for the Canary, (what would become the Canary), exchanging feverish emails with a person half a continent away. I don't remember anything about graduate school at that time, though I certainly was there--I think I finished my MA that summer. My hair was long then. My beard was long. I was fat. And it was a good year.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2005. Was it really three years ago? I guess my poetry years are spaced three years apart. If that's so, 2008 should be a dandy.