We have embarked...

A beautiful tribute to Wim Wenders' masterpiece, Wings of Desire.

The panic of wanting you

comes unexpectedly, distant need

close now, roaring in my ears,

how quickly it becomes irrational.

Where are you? Where have you been?

Where are you going? How did you

survive before the day we met?

Waiting for your call, the throb

of it in my hand, signal always on,

always transmitting.

How suddenly I am in the wrong house,

my rationale pounding on the door,

picking locks, testing windows

for any entry, because even as I

temporarily lose control, both of us –

my two halves – know it's nothing more

than misplaced desire.

This is New Orleans after all,

it comes in the rain.

– Collin Kelley

Time is like a clock in my heart...

I was a judge for In Motion magazine's Poems of Solidarity for Haiti competition last month and was thrilled that all the judges agreed that M. Ayodele Heath's "A Sharecropper's Pantoum" was the best of the bunch. Besides publication of the poem, $200 was donated to earthquake relief in Ayo's name. I also had the pleasure of interviewing him for In Motion. Read the poem here and the interview at this link.

American Idol wrapped last night after the WORST.SEASON.EVER., capped off by the tone-deaf Lee Dewyze winning the competition. Middle America loves its entertainers bland, safe and middle-of-the-road. Anyone with a little edge, like Crystal Bowersox, is instantly circumspect. I am officially retiring from recapping the show. I spent the last  four seasons recapping on my blog, for Entertainment Weekly's old blog, and then for Project Q Atlanta. It was fun, I've met some amazing people online and Project Q was fab for letting me be as snarky as I wanted to be week after week. If you missed last night's recap (or any from this season) click here.

I cannot believe it's already Memorial Day weekend. I'll be leaving in just over a month for my gig at Oxford and my writing time in Paris. Most of the trip is sorted, but I'm still trying to decide where to stay in Paris – and how many days I can afford. Not many, sadly. I am also geeking out over our planned visit to the Doctor Who Exhibition in Cardiff. Luckily, Karen and her hubby Colin are fans as well. Trust me, there's going to be lots of photos from Cardiff Bay where they film Torchwood. I've even taking my Captain Jack trench coat for a photo op. Now all I need is sonic screwdriver. Or a time vortex manipulator...

Read This: Inheritance, Poems by Steven Reigns

Steven Reigns writes with a memoirist's clarity and a clear mission: to excise the demons of the past, to expose buried secrets to the air and – most importantly – to offer a voice of compassion and understanding to those who've been down the same road.

The cycle of abuse recalled in Reigns' new collection, Inheritance ($13, Lethe Press), is nightmarish in its scope: from being sexually abused by a neighbor to the constant verbal and physical abuse from both parents who don't understand their gay son. These memories are journalistic in their concise, factual reporting, but also resonate with understated lyricism. There are no wasted words or sentiment.

Like Kim Noriega's chapbook Name Me (which I reviewed last week), Inheritance is a journey one must undertake, but the road is often filled with landmines sure to make readers wince more than once. And, yet, Inheritance is not only a necessary journey, but a must – for survivors and those untouched by abuse. There is a deeper understanding being told in these poems.

In "Playing With The Doll," a nine-year neighbor gradually turns from molesting a plastic doll to a young Reigns. When his mother finds the semen-coated doll and Reigns tells her of the abuse, her response is. "You're such a liar, don't blame it on anyone else. / You're sick Steven." The neighbor eventually moves on to molesting Reigns' sister.

The mother figure, beaten and demoralized by the father, takes out her anger and frustrations on her son, looking for any way to embarrass him or call his burgeoning sexuality into question. In "After the Ballgame," the mother taunts Reigns as he sits on the toilet, needling him about his poor performance as a baseball player – a sport he was forced into by his father.

I cannot think of ways to leave this situation.
My pants and underwear rest on my cleats.
My ass dirty,
my torso naked,
"You seem to want to be a girl.
Maybe we could go to the doctor and he could make you a girl."

When Reigns moves away and begins to explore his sexuality, the abuse from his past continues to haunt him. He wallows in cocaine, one-night stands and yearns for real love and affection. Meanwhile, his friends from the party circuit begin to succumb to AIDS.

Reigns turns to poetry to replace his missing parental figures. In "Mother," he details his attraction to female poets:

Reviewing my bookshelf I appear
more like a lost boy than a bibliophile.

Seeking out a mother figure
from women who mother words.

Along the way, Reigns finds familial bonds again from his sister and his elderly grandfather, who loves him unconditionally. From "100%":

My grandfather,
a man
who pats my head,
rubs my back,
kisses my cheek,
tells me he loves me,
and hopefully,
isn't ashamed that other men do the same.

Inheritance ends with Reigns still struggling to learn to love himself, but there is also a spark of hope – from the friendships and relationships he's made since he left his abusive childhood home. Reigns' poems have a cinematic quality about them, so it's fitting this collection ends on a cliffhanger. I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Keeper

The best keeper of secrets
is the victim.
Seven years of journal writing,
no names of abusers given.
Just relations:
neighbor,
dad,
mom,
cousin,
teacher.
Does namelessness equate to blamelessness?

Keeping secrets inside my body
a bleeding stomach,
disabling head pains,
and a learning disability
that keeps me behind and apart from my class.
Santa watched.
Ganesh kept obstacles intact.
God's ears went deaf
and Atlas played paper, rock, scissors.

Society, deities, gods, and monsters sat still
while my ass bled,
spoons broke,
hands moved around where they shouldn't
and embraces lingered too long.

Social Networking 101

My big post on Social Networking 101 is now up at the Vanilla Heart Publishing Author Blog. This past Saturday, I sat on the social networking panel at Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans with Michele Karlsberg, Cecilia Tan, Jess Wells and Gregory Gerard. The 70 minute session could have gone on for hours – probably days – and was one of the most well-attended panels of the weekend. Michele and I suggested to the powers that be that next year's session be a two-hour event with Powerpoint and interactivity. The blog post outlines some of the social network sites we discussed and the ones that I use to promote, connect and interact with other writers and fans.

Read This: Name Me, Poems by Kim Noriega

Kim Noriega's Name Me ($10, Fortunate Daughter Press) pulls no punches when it comes to detailing the beatings and abuse suffered at the hands of her father, lovers and a husband in this compelling debut chapbook.

While I rarely comment on cover art, the charming black and white photo of two girls at play and the heirloom-looking title plate do not prepare you for what's to come inside the book. Pretty houses often hide the most terrible secrets.

There is an astonishing amount of forgiveness in this chapbook and that's one of its strengths. Noriega can equally find the good and bad in her father, which manifests in the collection's longest poem, "The Sky, My Father," a litany of memories and pop culture reference points. From her earliest recollections to his old age, Noriega shows how deeply her father's life is entwined with her own:

My father, my stroke survivor.

My father, my Alright, I promise

I'll never die, my father,

my a little tired of living dad.

Being an abusive father's daughter leads to encounters with other damaged men as she grows older. In "What I Remember" she recounts making out with a boyfriend on snowy ground at age 16 (How we fell to the ground laughing. / How angels appeared in the snow / where we had lain) and then watching as he descends into alcoholism, drug addiction and abuse.

In "The Light of Day," Noriega tells her own daughter the story of how she and the girl's father stole pumpkins from a patch at 2 a.m. It's what she leaves out of the story that gives the poem its masterful  shift in tone from warm and fuzzy to fear and shame:

What I don't tell her is how my head swam with fear
all the way home.
He was drunk, but how drunk, too drunk again?
What was I doing riding down the highway at 90 miles an hour –
no foot pegs; legs wrapped around him; numb
fingers clinging to his leathers;
a huge stolen pumpkin on my lap?

Who would care for her if we made her an orphan
in an instant of asphalt and brains and pumpkin meat?

Name Me is both accessible and lyrical, but there is a creeping sense of fear the further in you go. Around every corner lurks unexpected violence, and Noriega's sequencing of the poems adds to this uneasiness. The closing stanzas of "Voila d'Amore" is a chilling example:

I want to end this poem
with a choir of angels
singing a cappella:

Alleluia,
we can all be free.

But there is an angel
peering over my shoulder
as I write this,

and she is not singing.

While the collection could easily collapse under the weight of the seemingly unending abuse, there is  resilience and reclamation of self in the final poems that keeps it from falling into easy victimhood. But be assured, there is nothing easy about these poems. They will disturb and linger like a bruise.

Heaven, 1963

It’s my favorite photo—
captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.”
It’s in black and white,
it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon,
before his tongue became a knife
that made my mother bleed,
and before he blackened my eye, the time
he thought I meant to end my life.

He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road
beneath the old chestnut tree.
He’s wearing sunglasses,
a light cotton shirt,
and a dreamy expression.

He’s twenty-seven.
I’m two.
My hair, still baby curls,
is being tossed by a gentle breeze.
I’m fast asleep in his arms.

Poets and Technology

Many thanks to Nic Sebastian for including me in a new series of interviews about poets and technology at her Very Like A Whale blog. Is technology destroying poetry or helping it flourish? Is Facebook and Twitter a writing distraction or a great way to share and promote your work? Check it out at this link.

Also taking part in the series in the coming weeks: Ren Powell, Chris Hamilton-Emery, Cati Porter, Ron Silliman, Sandra Beasley, Dave Bonta, January O’Neil, John Vick and Eric Elshtain. Amy King's response to the questions posted last week and can be found at this link.

Later this week, I'll be posting a Social Networking 101 post with some notes and thoughts from this past weekend's Saints & Sinners Literary Festival.

Give Us Time, We Will Destroy

Another haunting, urgent soundscape from filmmaker and electronic musician Brokenkites. Hear more music at Brokenkites' YouTube channel and explore the Hollow Scene website, which features music, fiction, photography and films.

Here comes the rain again...

It's 7:40 a.m. in New Orleans on a stormy Sunday morning. I'm getting ready to head back to Atlanta, although I wish I was staying another day to hang out with the people I know or the new people I've met at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. For me, it's not so much the event, but the people who make this annual trip worth the seven hour drive. Sadly, I forgot my camera, so I have no incriminating photos to share. I'm hoping others will share some soon so I can post them here and at Facebook.

I must thank my wonderful host Chris Smith, who kindly put me up in his gorgeous guest house, Le Papillon, in the Faubourg Marigny (pictured). The house is well over 140 years old, so you can see and feel the history. I'm actually behind the main house in what was once the slave quarters. I think it might be a bit haunted. On Friday and Saturday morning, I was woken by a gentle shaking of the bed. Things hung up securely -- towels, a jacket -- were mysteriously on the floor. Rugs were turned back. I wasn't scared at all, in fact I felt rather comforted by whoever was here before me. 

I read Steven Reigns new collection of poetry, Inheritance, sitting in the lobby of the Bourbon Orleans Hotel waiting to meet folks for dinner on Friday night. I'll be writing a review of it on the blog in the next couple of days, but you absolutely must read this collection. I didn't just read it -- I devoured it. His candid, confessional poems about sexual abuse, friends and lovers lost to AIDS and the maddening mixed signals from lovers is stark and honest. He's my new poetry hero, and just a lovely man in general.

The social media panel I was part of was one of the most well-attended events of the weekend. Since there were five of us, I talked exclusively about how writers can use Twitter. I'll talk more about this panel in another post, because there was lots of good information to share that I think all writers can use.

My reading from Conquering Venus was good, but since we only had 10 minutes to read, I didn't make it all the way through the chapter. It sort of ended on a cliffhanger, but was good encouragement to get folks to buy the book. And buy they did. Barnes & Noble had Venus at the bookfair, but they ran low, so I gave them some of the copies I brought with me. 

I sat in on some other panels, including one on how news can influence poetry and writing short fiction, which is something I'd like to try again. I wrote a couple of short stories back in the 90s that I never even bothered to submit anywhere. They just felt like warm-up exercises to me. Hearing Peter Dube, Philip Gambone, Chavisa Woods and G. Winston James talk about it yesterday made me want to try again.

I've done a good bit of eating while I've been here, because New Orleans culture hinges on good eating. I ate at my beloved Clover Grill on Bourbon Street, but the real experience was eating at Chef Paul Prudhomme's K-Paul's on Chartres Street in the Quarter. It was most definitely worth the wait. I had a blackened ribeye and it was spectacular. I don't like my steak blackened (or burned as I usually call it), but I've changed my mind. 

Yesterday afternoon and evening, a storm moved into the city. I sat in the lobby for awhile and worked on a new poem. I felt a creeping since of melancholy that hasn't quite departed. Maybe it's because I have such a long history with this town (I once wanted to live here) and while I've been trying not to get overwhelmed by nostalgia these days, it came over me without warning watching the rain fall in the Quarter. I remembered being here after breaking up with Chris, coming here with Billy to party, having laughs with BFF Tina on the streetcar. And maybe there was a little case of misplaced desire. Sometimes it shows up unexpectedly. Just like the rain.

Oh, Sinnerman, where you gonna run to...

This weekend is the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival and I'll be doing both of my gigs on Saturday -- a panel on social media at 10 a.m. followed by a reading from Conquering Venus. If you happen to be at the festival, too, do say hello. What I love most about S&S is that it's laid back, no pressure and full of friendly folks with no hidden agendas. Okay, somebody might be trying to get in your pants...

This week, I received an invitation to read at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville this October. I already know fab poet Stacey Lynn Brown is going to be there, and I'm hoping there will be some familiar faces attending as well. Nashville is a fun town, so I'm looking forward to it.

This past weekend, I rediscovered an artist I hadn't heard from in many years -- the brilliant Tanita Tikaram. She arrived on the scene in the late 80s as part of a wave of amazing female musicians like Sinead O'Connor, Tracy Chapman and Toni Childs. Tanita's debut, Ancient Heart, was so diametrically opposed to everything else on the charts at the time, that critics stumbled all over themselves to categorize her. That album featured what is now a classic song, "Twist in My Sobriety." Three more great albums -- The Sweet Keeper, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Lovers in the City -- followed, and then I lost track.

Well, in 2005, Tanita released Sentimental in Europe and it has quickly become my go-to chill out album. Her unmistakable husky voice mixed with some Burt Bacharach-inspired jazz -- and Nick Lowe offering guest vocals on a couple of tracks -- is a treat. The album is available to download on iTunes and I highly recommend it. You can hear every track at Tanita's website, too. Love you, TT.

Over at Project Q Atlanta, the readers have turned on me, labeling my recaps of this shitty season of American Idol as "bitchy," "mean" and "grumpy." Damn right I'm grumpy. This season has been sucking my will to live. Only a couple more weeks until I permanently hang up my recap pen. And this time I mean it. Seriously.

Weekend Music: Tightrope by Janelle Monae ft. Big Boi

Totally love this song!

I have not been to Oxford Town...yet

Some of you might have noticed the update in the Book Tour sidebar earlier this week, but I can now give some details about my big summer plans.

In July, I'll be guest lecturing about social media and literature at Worcester College at Oxford University (pictured)  in England as part of Georgia Tech's study abroad program. I can hardly believe it. My friend, the loverly poet and professor Karen Head, made this extraordinary opportunity happen, and I'm thrilled beyond words. Me...at Oxford. Surely they'll stop me at passport control at Gatwick Airport and tell me to take my unlearned ass back to America.

After Oxford, I'll be heading to Cardiff for a poetry reading with Karen, Ivy Alvarez and Mab Jones. We're planning to stay overnight so we can watch the World Cup and so I can go to the Doctor Who Museum. Yes, I am that kind of geek.

I don't know if I'll do a reading in London (I'm thinking no at this point), but I will be hanging out with friends who are coming in from various places and I'll be going down to Kent to see my friends Peter and Krys. She's a brilliant photographer and wants me to do a sitting in her new studio.

Then, I'm making my way to Paris for a few days and my plan is to finish the second novel while I'm there. I'll be scouting locations and just soaking up the city after nearly a decade away. It will be the 15th anniversary of my first trip to Paris, which inspired Conquering Venus.

Justice for Clay Greene and Harold Scull

During the month of May, Vanilla Heart Publishing will be donating 25 percent of the publisher's proceeds from my novel, Conquering Venus, as well as L.E. Harvey's Loving Her, Kate Evan's Complementary Colors and Sarah Natalia Lee's Saving Amy, to the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) to aid in the case of Greene vs. County of Sonoma.

While the NCLR is helping spread the word, the case actually involves two elderly gay men, Clay Greene and his 20-year partner Harold Scull, who were forced by a hospital and Sonama County in California to separate and go into different nursing homes. They're relationship was ignored despite the fact that they had drawn up legal documents including wills, powers of attorney and medical directives. What happened to them is one of the worst cases of injustice I've ever heard about. It's also further proof that gays and lesbians do not have the same civil and human rights in this country.

After a serious fall, Harold was hospitalized and Clay should have been the one making his partner's medical decisions, but the hospital and county stepped in and forcibly put them in separate nursing homes. Clay was not allowed to see Harold and while they were in the nursing homes, the county went a step further and sold all their personal belongings and had the lease to their home terminated. Worst of all is that Harold died in the nursing home and Clay did not get to say goodbye.

The case will go to court in July and supporters of Clay and Harold are raising money to take this all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. You can read all the details at this NCLR link or at the New York Times. There is also a Facebook page about Clay and Harold.

If you haven't purchased a copy of Conquering Venus, this is the month to do so. Visit this link to find out where to buy Venus and the other titles. If you already own the book, please make a donation to NCLR to help Clay and Harold find justice. The fight for equality continues.

Pushcarts, Twitterature and Lynn Redgrave

Poet and playwright Alice Shapiro is working on an audio project, The Change Interviews, at her website. The project features poets discussing and reading their Pushcart Prize-nominated work. Alice asked me to participate and you can hear me talking about and reading "Jean Arthur at the Lincoln Memorial," which was published and nominated by Hobble Creek Review, at this link. There are also readings by Elena Karina Byrne, Bryan Borland, Ray Sharp, Lynne Thompson and others. Many thanks, Alice.

Back in March, Joe Milazzo, associate editor of California Institute of the Arts' literary journal Black Clock, asked me and three other writers, artists and editors – Phil Gyford, Andy Hunter and Kevin Thom – to participate in an e-roundtable on how Twitter is transforming literature. The results is "Twitterature: When Moby Dick Became The Fail Wail." You can read the article and transcript at this link.

Very sad to hear about the passing of Lynn Redgrave after a seven year battle with breast cancer. She was fantastic is so many films, including Georgy Girl and Gods and Monsters, and her many stage roles.

Blog Update

The renovation of Modern Confessional is now complete after I finished the "Books" tab with links to all my books, cds and anthology appearances. You can click on the book covers for more information and to purchase. I'm working on the Conquering Venus blog now. I have to hand it to Blogger for really stepping up their game. The new template creator, pages and other widgets really helped give my blog a website feel.

The schedule for the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival is posted and I've got back-to-back events on Saturday, May 15, with a 10 a.m. panel on social media (with Gregory Gerard, Michele Karlsberg, Cecilia Tan and Jess Wells) and a reading from Conquering Venus at 11:30 a.m. Both events are at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel on Bourbon Street. I can't wait to get back to New Orleans.

I realized that my promise to post Twitter Poets 3.0 didn't happen in April during National Poetry Month. I still plan to post a new list in the coming months. In the meantime, check out the original Poets on Twitter and the Poets on Twitter 2.0 lists.