I Love Your Blog

Many thanks to Kristen Hovet at Vesper's Escape for nominating my blog for, well, ... "I Love Your Blog!"

Here are the rules, as posted on Vesper's Escape:

1 - Add the logo to your blog.
2 - Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.
3 - Nominate at least 7 other bloggers.
4 - Add links to their blogs.
5 - Leave a comment for your nominees on their blogs!

Vesper's Escape has obviously already received the award, or I'd enthusiastically nominate it. Here's a list of four (so far) intriguing blogs that I nominate for the honor:

Madam Mayo -- Translator and award-winning writer (as well as my personal literary guiding light!), C. M. Mayo, writes this enlightening and entertaining literary blog. Visit her site for a wealth of book news, writing exercises and tips, guest blogger posts and recommendations, and more fascinating links than you can click on. (And I highly praise her collection, Sky Over El Nido, which won The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.)

A Walk Around the Lake -- Poet Pamela Hart writes beautifully about poetry and poets, as well as art, nature, books, and ... life. To give you a taste of the deep writing on her blog, here's a tiny sample from a recent post: "I like the grid, the horizon line, the fragment, the shard. I like Rothko's blocks of color. And Diebenkorn's cartographies of blotched and colored land mass. I adore Agnes Martin quilted grids. I don't mind at all if a poem is broken. I can sometimes knit the poet's language together, or not. I prefer it when a poem isn't made neatly, even though I do this myself occasionally. I am not an orderly person." I savor the dialogue between our blogs.

Stu Jenks: Fezziwig Photography -- Multi-talented photographer Stu Jenks sums up the themes for his blog as "Toy, Nocturnal, Digital & Sport Photography; Stories of The Road; Stories of The Land; Stories about Photography and The Process." Check out his gorgeous pictures and lively, heartfelt stories. As I wrote about Stu's work in a 4/1/08 post on my blog, "It's fascinating to read what he writes on his blog about his creative process, to follow his evolving methods, to witness his discoveries about the landscape, the people, and himself. He places himself at the intersection of planned location and beautiful accident. He's open to what arrives and captures it on film."

Will. Love. Logic -- Artist Elin Waterston is making a block print every day in 2008, "on accounta because it's a leap year." She is posting them daily on her blog. After scrolling through them, travel back in time, pre-print project, to discover other visual entertainment, arty anecdotes, family insights and funny stuff.

Thanks again, Vesper's Escape, and congratulations to the first four nominees!

Thank You, Thank You

Many thanks to the generous bloggers at Madam Mayo and Vesper's Escape, who kindly wrote on their blogs about my August 17th post, Questioning the Blog. The reader responses, both by blog comments and separate e-mails, have been intriguing and supportive. I appreciate all of you out there who take the time to visit, read, respond ... and blog. Thanks.

The photo of the little robot holding a black-eyed Susan was taken this afternoon out in my yard. Click on image to enlarge.

Questioning the Blog

No, I’m not interrogating the blog, aiming an unbearably bright light in its twitching eyes. I’m questioning myself. Why do I do this? (Blink-blink.) Even the label, blog, sounds frivolous or unclear, like a cross between “blahblahblah” and fog or bog. Originally, I created the blog (with initial set-up help from my older daughter) so that there was a place where people could find my books and contact me. One of my literary guiding lights, C. M. Mayo, had asked me to guest blog on Madam Mayo after my second book, Stirring the Mirror, came out last August. I needed a site to link to! So, in a way, it forced my hand. On August 13, 2007, the blog was born.

Since the initial days, the blog has evolved into…well, I’m not quite sure what. Essentially, I’ve let it just happen. I don’t want to build a fence around it. I've let it sprawl. To answer my own question why, I’ve come up with the following thoughts:

1. It places me more fully in my life.

2. It marks passage through time, engraving mile markers along the route.

3. It clarifies nebulous thoughts.

4. It’s a commitment to writing and art.

5. It’s an openness to the possibilities of art/creativity in the world, a reaching out to reel in those possibilities, to anchor and join them in a specific place.

6. It’s an exercise in synthesis, a weaving together of threads from reading, poetry , the visual arts, nature, culture, all fleeting experience.

7. It’s an exploration of both reality and dreams.

8. It keeps me looking, thinking, witnessing, reading and rereading, listening, feeling and creating – cinching the ragged edges of the universe a bit closer.

9. I like the casual, rambling style of “essay” (lyric essay?) that I feel free to write here. I like that relaxed autonomy. It lets me experiment with form, with hybrid writing, which I love.

10. I enjoy the communication, the sharing of ideas and information. I love hearing from those who visit the blog, who have other thoughts to add, who make additional connections, who offer suggestions and expand the posts. I like the idea of a network of blogs.

11. And, hey, I like the rare free stuff! Recently, after a brief post about Matsuo Basho, I received an e-mail from the publishers of a new collection of his work, Basho: The Complete Haiku, translated by Jane Reichhold, asking if I’d like a copy. Yes. I now have the lovely hardcover, and will focus on it soon. John Glick of Plumtree Pottery also mailed me a surprise: a beautiful, swirling universe of a ceramic tile. Thanks.

12. Along the same theme, I’ve enjoyed receiving invitations to submit work, or requests to reprint writing and photographs from the blog.

13. I get a thrill out of taking those photographs, then finding the right words to go with them. I like setting up little scenes, going off on tangents, letting inspiration unspool. This is serious fun.

14. Okay, and I savor the “search for the sublime.” Those are the insightful words of Annie Dillard, writing about polar explorers: “They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can be found, here or there – around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days.” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 41)

After a year, I’m setting no limits on the blog. I’m allowing it an amoeboid existence, the freedom to expand and contract. I’m here, waiting, meandering, open to the unfurling possibilities. I’ll end here with more of Dillard’s wisdom:

“Wherever we go, there can be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

The final quote is again from Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 42. The photo of the colorful maple leaf (already?!) was taken –literally – on my road on 8/15/08.

Guest Blogging on Madam Mayo

In mid-August, I was invited by C. M. Mayo, gifted author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (Milkweed Editions) and Sky Over El Nido (Univ. Georgia Press, Flannery O'Connor Award), to guest-blog on her blog, Madam Mayo. She is also the founding editor of Tameme and editor of Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press). Check out her Web page at www.cmmayo.com and her blog at Madam Mayo.

Here's the post, starting with Catherine's introduction:

Guest-blogging today is New York poet and visual artist Christine Boyka Kluge, the author of Teaching Bones to Fly (2003) and Stirring the Mirror (2007), both from Bitter Oleander Press, and Domestic Weather (2004), which won the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest. Other awards include winning the 2006 Hotel Amerika Poetry Contest and the 1999 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award and receiving several Pushcart Prize nominations. Christine Boyka Kluge has "guest-blogged" for me back when I didn't even have this blog--- back when I was doing the "daily 5 minute writing exercises" (a kind of blog). Hers was definitely one of the most original. You can read it here (scroll down to October 22nd, "Falling Mirror").


Thanks for the lovely words, Catherine! These were my literary Web site suggestions for Madam Mayo's readers:

Since I love hybrid writing (prose poems, flash fiction, lyric essays, etc.), collaborations, and experimental work, I was delighted to discover the following Web sites. For summer entertainment and enlightenment, here are links to five extraordinary, inventive literary sites:

1. Born Magazine: Art and Literature Collaboration
They describe themselves as “an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media.” The editors arrange collaborations between writers and artists, and the results are fascinating. Sometimes a musician gets into the mix. You’ll get lost in these creative masterpieces as you click your way through new little worlds.

2. The Diagram
How can you resist an electronic journal that claims to “value the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance…. Ruins and ghosts. Mechanical, moving parts, balloons, and frenzy.” The Diagram is chock full of odd diagrams and art, innovative poetry and prose, and everything in between.

3. Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts
From Virginia Commonwealth University, Blackbird is a feast of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, interviews, streaming audio, and video. There is always something new to intrigue and educate the visitor. Try the “browse” button.

4. Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction
Double Room’s goal is “to explore the intersection of prose poetry and flash fiction.” You’ll find a wealth of topnotch hybrid writing here, as well as discussion of the forms. Contributors answer questions about prose poetry and flash fiction. Art, too!

5. Bound Off: A Monthly Literary Audio Magazine
Bound Off releases a new podcast of short stories (and short-short stories) every month. Pieces are read aloud by their authors or the editors. Some musical interludes as well. Fun listening!