How to celebrate Easter when you live alone and are only culturally Protestant, not a true believer in either the Christ or Passover myths? I woke up early, was delighted to be seemingly serenaded by the first brown thrasher (my favorite non-human jazz improvisationist), and decided that in honor of the holiday I would:
- take a brief nap after coming in from the porch, before the caffeine from my tea kicked in
- make a cup of coffee from the small supply of beans in my freezer
- open my email and see how Tim Green had laid out my latest contribution to Rattle‘s “Poets Respond” feature. I needn’t have worried, it looks great:
Here’s the link for it on the web.
I honestly did not expect them to take it. Something about the poem seemed off to me, and it felt as though I was simply repeating a formula that had worked for me last time, in 2021: a linked-verse-type poem about US military imperialism. But Tim and Katie suggested a couple of edits, including amputating the opening verse, which I was happy enough to agree to. I’ll put it on the back-burner for a while, and see about possibly revising the opening before posting it to Woodrat photohaiku next April 1, if I remember. Though like all poems in this weekly series from Rattle, I’m responding to current events:
Oh for a silent spring, and not one filled with explosions and implosions and the unhinged Truths of Mad King Donald! But imperial conquest of one sort or another has been going on for more than 500 years, and spring whether silent or otherwise is mostly a parade of invasive species now.
This was my third magazine acceptance of the year so far — a streak I don’t expect to last — and I’ve had a few other publications over the past many months since I last posted an update on such things, but I’ll hold all that for another time because the Protestant ancestors are hissing in my ear not to be so focused on myself on today of all days! But I would like to say how gratified I am that Rattle editors actually understand Japanese-derived forms such as haiku and linked verse. I don’t know of any other prominent American literary magazine where that would be the case, since the academic types who dominate lit mag culture largely refuse to engage with the English-language haiku community, which as a result has become ghettoized. In this environment, Rattle forms an invaluable bridge. I also admire their business acumen, and love getting a single-author chapbook bundled together with each new issue: for a book-collector like me, that makes a subscription irresistible, even if up to 75% of the contents of the magazine don’t interest me, which is sometimes the case when they go heavy on narrative poetry that isn’t nature-focused.
I’ve been meaning to write something in essay form about what it means to be a culture worker in a time of imperial collapse, though possibly I get into politics often enough in the Pepys erasure series that folks don’t really need to hear anything more from me in that regard. If this rain stops, maybe I will plant some trees instead. I have 24 red spruce ready to go into deer-proof cages in the hollow…