La Fovea

I was invited by wonderful poet Pamela Hart to join in the fun on La Fovea, an online literary magazine with an intriguing concept. Editor Frank Giampietro just posted two of my prose poems, "Tortoiseshell" and "Bride Number Two." If you want to read them, simply click on this link:

La Fovea

Then make sure to travel on and explore this expanding community of poets!

I was fascinated by the unusual way this publication works. Here is a description from the Web site explaining "the rules":

•Each nerve editor (found on the main page) is in charge of a nerve. The nerves are made up of poets who are invited to submit to La Fovea. Click on the editor's name to see all the poets and poems in his or her nerve.

•The nerve editor asks a poet to submit two poems. After that poet has had his or her poems published on La Fovea, he or she will ask another poet to submit poems.

•If the last poet on the nerve does not find a poet to submit poems for whatever reason, the nerve is called "dead." It's okay to have a "dead nerve." The important thing is for the nerve editor to notice that a nerve has died and begin a new nerve from their first page of poems.

I also enjoyed the inspirational quote from a letter Frank O'Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch, which explains the title, La Fovea. Here are O'Hara's words:

"Kenneth you really are the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system / which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance / of distraught experiences and hysterical desires so to keep things humming / and have nothing go off the trackless tracks"

--Frank O'Hara

And now, a brief biology lesson about the eye from La Fovea's editor, Frank Giampietro:

The fovea is the place on the back of the eye where the nerves gather and take signals from the eye to the brain. Ironically, the fovea is the only place on the back of the eye that does not imprint an image. Instead the brain fills in the image based on information around it so that we don't have a small spot in our vision.

We think the term is, well, poetic and sums up in a metaphor a lot of what it means to find, and "to see," excellent poems.

The poets whose work appears on this website agree in part or in whole with the following manifesto:

1. We believe that it makes no sense to say one form of poetry is more valid or more artistic than any other.

2. We believe that the old model of submission/rejection is but only one way for finding and publishing the best poetry.

3. We want poets rather than poet/editors to have more editorial authority in general. Poets should be able to champion people they love and have their opinions "matter."

4. We think La Fovea will encourage poets to read each other's poems because they will want to know who else is on their nerve. They will want to ask, "With whom am I related?"

Thanks to Pam for inviting me to join her nerve on La Fovea, and thanks to Frank for posting the prose poems. Stay tuned to find out who I invited to join the nerve.

Oh ... the wildly gorgeous eyes above belong to a very laid-back ragdoll cat, Poodiddy, who belongs -- sort of -- to my younger brother and sister-in-law. He didn't even seem to mind my camera right up next to his whiskers. Click on the image to enlarge.

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!