WEBSITE UPDATE & OTHER THOUGHTS: I'm in the process of updating the main site at www.collinkelley.com for August. I only have three appearances on the calendar for this month before things start getting hectic again in the fall. A trip back to NYC in November may happen for a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club with other contributors to The Pedestal. I'm getting material together for the spoken word CD that I plan to have available in November. I'll be selling it from my website and at my gigs. It's only going to be $5. On Sept. 11, I will have the pleasure to perform at the Carter Center in Atlanta with great poets John Stone, Cecilia Woloch, Ralph Tejeda-Wilson, Tania Rochelle, Ayodele, Cherryl Floyd-Miller, Alice Lovelace and Kodac Harrison among others. This will be the official poetry event of the Atlanta Book Festival. The evening will be dedicated to the families of the terrorist attacks. Should be an exciting and moving evening of poetry.
Yesterday, I recorded another edition of The Business of Words with guest David Herrle, who's the editor of one of my fave online zines, SubtleTea. He gave a great interview and I stumbled over my words and was speaking gibberish. Thank god it's taped and can be edited. I sounded like a moron. Before the taping, I had been at a Poetry Atlanta meeting where we had a ton of things to discuss. Kodac and Ayodele are talking about getting a slam team together to go to the nationals, there's also a Poet's Phonebook in the works and I'm also working with Kodac on finally getting the Java Monkey Speaks anthology published. Cherryl wants to get an online database of Georgia writers up and running. I agree this would be an invaluable tool for so many and I offered to help her with it.
By the end of the day, I was just about poetry-ed out. It was one of those days where I was too involved in the "PoBiz" (that's poetry business) instead of being involved in the creation of poetry. Last night, I had to shake it all off and sit down and write the first draft of a new poem. I've had a number of conversations with Cecilia Woloch about poets who get so caught up in the business of poetry that their work suffers. I felt I was headed that way myself, and was one of the reasons I cancelled some gigs this summer so I could refocus on my novel, Conquering Venus, and write new poetry. Another thing that happened yesterday was that some of my poems got rejected (for the third time) from a literary magazine I've always wanted to be published in. For about 20 minutes I was so pissed off, especially judging from the quality of work included in their last issue. Then I just shrugged it off. There's no accounting for taste, and I simply don't have time to worry about it. I have to remember to count all the blessings and good things that have come my way this last year. Getting caught up in the politics of poetry at a literary magazine is not my scene.
On a final note for this entry, the "Literary Links" section is posted on the left side of the screen. Check some of those out. My Blog is now officially on the Blogarama directory, which hopefully means more people will see it. And, yes, I did finish the read-through of Conquering Venus on Thursday night. While I was mainly on a mission to edit out unnecessary adverbs, I also discovered a poem that I had written nearly 10 years ago that simply had to be included in the text. I think I mentioned that my main character, Martin, is a poet and the novel has a number of his works scattered throughout. How I missed adding this "found" poem when I was first writing the novel escapes me, but I take it as a sign that Conquering Venus will soon find a publishing home.
Yesterday, I recorded another edition of The Business of Words with guest David Herrle, who's the editor of one of my fave online zines, SubtleTea. He gave a great interview and I stumbled over my words and was speaking gibberish. Thank god it's taped and can be edited. I sounded like a moron. Before the taping, I had been at a Poetry Atlanta meeting where we had a ton of things to discuss. Kodac and Ayodele are talking about getting a slam team together to go to the nationals, there's also a Poet's Phonebook in the works and I'm also working with Kodac on finally getting the Java Monkey Speaks anthology published. Cherryl wants to get an online database of Georgia writers up and running. I agree this would be an invaluable tool for so many and I offered to help her with it.
By the end of the day, I was just about poetry-ed out. It was one of those days where I was too involved in the "PoBiz" (that's poetry business) instead of being involved in the creation of poetry. Last night, I had to shake it all off and sit down and write the first draft of a new poem. I've had a number of conversations with Cecilia Woloch about poets who get so caught up in the business of poetry that their work suffers. I felt I was headed that way myself, and was one of the reasons I cancelled some gigs this summer so I could refocus on my novel, Conquering Venus, and write new poetry. Another thing that happened yesterday was that some of my poems got rejected (for the third time) from a literary magazine I've always wanted to be published in. For about 20 minutes I was so pissed off, especially judging from the quality of work included in their last issue. Then I just shrugged it off. There's no accounting for taste, and I simply don't have time to worry about it. I have to remember to count all the blessings and good things that have come my way this last year. Getting caught up in the politics of poetry at a literary magazine is not my scene.
On a final note for this entry, the "Literary Links" section is posted on the left side of the screen. Check some of those out. My Blog is now officially on the Blogarama directory, which hopefully means more people will see it. And, yes, I did finish the read-through of Conquering Venus on Thursday night. While I was mainly on a mission to edit out unnecessary adverbs, I also discovered a poem that I had written nearly 10 years ago that simply had to be included in the text. I think I mentioned that my main character, Martin, is a poet and the novel has a number of his works scattered throughout. How I missed adding this "found" poem when I was first writing the novel escapes me, but I take it as a sign that Conquering Venus will soon find a publishing home.
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