By way of Kate Bernadette Benedict, I have discovered this SpokenVerse channel at YouTube, at which I was immediately attracted to this reading of “A Conservative” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Don’t let the picture of Glenn Beck defer you. Play it at YouTube to cut out the middle man of embedded streaming.
Speaking of Kate, there is a brand new issue of Umbrella up. I invite you to explore.
Kate also has an incisive poem in the green issue of Soundzine, as do my friends Antonia Clark and Mary Meriam. I invite you to explore there, too.
Meanwhile, qarrtsiluni has completed its Health Issue, which includes my poem “Relics” and a bunch of other good stuff. Look around there, too. Co-editors Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson write in their summary:
Our hope was to focus on and highlight health — both the radiant, full-bodied, energetic variety, and the various ways health is impaired or depleted. We struggled to balance the issue, hoping to equally include pieces that celebrate the joy we experience in health and that explore the grief in our disease and dying. We were continually surprised at how difficult this was, as the majority of submissions we received focused on ill health.
We wondered why the focus seemed more on our dis-ease than on our vibrancy. Is it that we use writing to, as Gregory Orr says, “(sing) the pain back into the wound?”
Revealing of my age and health status that I tend to want to read that last sentence “sing the back pain into the wound.”
Rumors have reached me that the Dead Poets Society of America is planning a second annual Dead Poets Bash in Lexington Cemetery on Wednesday, May 5, at 3:30 p.m. If/When I know more, I’ll let you all know.
