Category: zuihitsu

A distinguished colleague at one of our CCCU campuses, Dr. Susan VanZanten of Seattle Pacific University (home of a low-res M.F.A. Program and the literary journal, Image), announces her new publication on one of my favorites:  Emily Dickinson!

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Susan writes:  “I’m delighted to announce that my new book on Emily Dickinson is now available.    Written for a general audience, it provides an introduction to reading Dickinson that helps readers unpack Dickinson’s intense but brief poems, supplying historical background and personal stories in order to help readers to embark upon their own meditative journeys with Dickinson.”

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Prayer:  “The soul should always stand ajar. / Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

New catalog available from Tupelo Press, information about the Colrain Manuscript Conference, two more days to submit to the Dorset Prize, and a new poem by y madrone of Columbia College Chicago: “Tulip is the bravest flower, I mean bird.” 

I love this poem’s sparse, elliptical imagery.  With an eloquent economy of words… tulips are birds, are pigeons, are ubiquitous… are tulips.  

Favorite lines:  “And so are we, sort of.  Tulips: / most prolific worldwide.”
          — y madrone

A short biography:  y madrone currently lives in Chicago, IL via Olympia, Washington via Baku, Ahzerbaijan.

So pleased to thank Allison Joseph in person, at last, for her voice & vision as a poet & publisher!  Here’s a “shout out” to Allison from the Poetry Foundation blog (with poem “Signatures”), and here’s a sample poem, “Extraction,” from her Mayapple Press collection.

I’m enjoying Prageeta Sharma’s use of the word, “candor,” in the eponymous poem which appears in her collection, Infamous Landscapes.  Here are tiny snippets:

Candor

Candor may have indeed arrived
. . .

Above the water, I have loved so much
that is unbearable to divulge

. . .

Of candor in the grass . . . 

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Now available… my academic chapter on Korean martyr Yu Guan Soon  in Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (originally titled Women Warriors: From Asia to Asian America), edited by Professor Lan Dong, University of Illinois.  Click here to see the table of illustrious contents!

This weekend, with a team of wonderful students from my university, I will participate in the 5k walk-a-thon, “Making Strides against Breast Cancer.”  The students organized a poetry writing event and a prayer night on the theme of healing journeys & spread the word themselves… such beautiful labors of the heart.  

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Gifts I’ve received from students over a decade of teaching:  chocolates, baked goodies, a giant pomegranate, red fish gummy-things, one grapefruit, three sunflowers, lavender bubble bath, floral writing notebooks, poetry collections, letters, cards, postcards, many hugs, bouquets of random flowers, and most of all, the realization of their dreams & successes.  Now their enthusiastic participation in “Making Strides” is one more gift! 

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Afterward, at home where no one can see or hear my, er, novice technique, I will play my cherrywood harp in honor of International Peace Hour, sponsored by Harpists for Peace.

I had the pleasure of reading with Cynthia Arrieu-King at AWP Chicago.  As trumpeted by Kundiman, she has a new book coming out from Octopus! 

Here’s an interview with Cynthia: “My poetry asks what happens when the other speaks rather than merely being named.”

Neat biographical fact I learned about Cynthia when I first met her in Chicago:  She once worked as an echocardiographer… pretty neat, eh?  

A poetic expert on the human heart. 

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