Organizing your writing life

POETRY 101: Many thanks to those who have taken a moment to vote for me as 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere at BloggingPoet.com. The voting continues through Sunday, April 29, so please continue to vote at this link.

If you're in Fayetteville, GA this coming Saturday, April 28, from 1 - 3 p.m., I'll be doing a special reading/workshop called Poetry 1o1 at the Fayette County Public Library to mark National Poetry Month. I'll be discussing and reading favorite poems that cover the entire spectrum of the art from Shakespeare and Sappho to Natasha Trethewey and Ted Kooser...and many stops in between. You can download the PDF of the Poetry 101 flyer at this link (it's very cool!) or find directions and details here. Hope to see some of you at this free event.

My review of Charles Jensen's brilliant chapbook Living Things is now online at The Pedestal.

Fellow blogging poet Bill Knott accused all the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere nominees of being "dead tree" poets because he doesn't think we have enough of our own poetry posted. Many of you might have noticed that online zines and some mags now consider posting of a poem on your blog as publication. Since I'm still actively sending out new work and receiving requests from editors for new material, I've limited posting new work here. However, I did want to post this poem, War for Oil, because Iranian poet Sheema Kalbasi (who I featured with in Redlands a couple of weeks ago and will hopefully be coming to Atlanta this summer) likes this poem and mentioned it on her blog. So, this is for Sheema and Bill. Thanks to poeticdiversity, who originally published this in 2006. I wrote the poem in 2005 and, sadly, the situation in Dafur has not changed.

War for Oil (Darfur, Africa)

The skies over Darfur are quiet,
save for the wind in wings of vultures
waiting for that almost meatless child,
clinging to its mother’s shriveled breast.
The gunfire is sporadic, off to the east
where soldiers of misfortune round up
those who ran from the camp.
There is no fear of bombs, this place
barely exists, offers no kickbacks
to presidents, their kin or commanders.
There’s only scrabbled ground
wet with blood as women are raped
or a skull is cracked.
No liberation force is coming,
no toppling of statues or searches
for weapons of mass destruction.
Here is famine, genocide,
dark skin pouring black oil
that holds no currency.