Recent rejection from Lana Turner; I wonder if I"ll ever send poems which "fit"?  I get rejected by C Bedient at-least once a year!

I, a few minutes ago, sent a manuscript submission titled Country to Cloud City.

Urgh--rejections

Pleiades--ok, this is no biggy to me; but I thought two of my submissions to 1913 would make for really good matches, so that's rather deflating/frustrating, and especially because I'm quite fond of 1913.

I guess this is revealing what a wretched aesthete I am: I am cheered that Evie Shockley's poem in honor/in anger at the death of Trayvon Martin does not just repeat an end-word in each couplet to form its Ghazal-ness, but also employs that, for my mindearheart, utterly necessary front-rhyme preceding the repeated end-word.  Honestly, I find, aside from its prosody, the poem a bit dull: there's indisputable truth in it, but it's sociological more than linguistic, and so I am not taken to a "new" location for consciousness, and so the poem for me ultimately ends up lacking urgency and instead seems like a summary of some of the worst of racial politics in the USA.  That said, the newly added couplet which directly references TM works the best I think, as the idea of being punished for surviving is poignant.

Here's a link in which a sequence--Taking Off--is mentioned: http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2012/03/ongoing-notes-late-late-march-2012.html

My full-length collection, For Days, is now available at/from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Adam-Strauss/dp/1609640772

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I just spent two hours updating my CV and--pshoosh, the computer got rid of it!  And I had been saving it frequently, but then the only version available is the one when I initially opened the document today.  Annoying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

          So I think one of the questions Derrida may be arriving at in an essay of his questioning and celebrating work by Emanuel Levinas (is it just me or is that a particularly beautiful name?) is to query why words mean what they mean: why is the word duck a feathered water bird; why is creator God. I’m ten pages away from completing a perusal of this essay by JD. It’s been both dull and engaging, utterly difficult to discern and incisively sinuous.

          I’m nowhere near even a thoroughly rudimentary comprehension, but can this billow, this veil, this rending, this rendering, this shimmer in flakes as they fall and refresh, ever conjoin such a total moment as I declare comprehension, which might be one way of saying I can’t confidently provide even one illustrative quotation, and to cite several and argue their connection is more work than I’m willing to accomplish.
          When I look at the scene cast by my reflection, my sense drapes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse in shimmering webs like spider weavings as well as clouds. Webs makes for, ironically, relatively easy philological departure to nets, meshes, “language grill” according to one translation of the Celan. And, ah lovely logic, the webs I drape here and there across Virginia’s pages are in fact nets she has conjured, enwrapped me in.
          Now that an hour and a half has elapsed, I’ve completed a perusal. It’s taken me several days but, finally, I have glanced at each word on all sixty or so pages of Jacque’s essay. I think it has been worthwhile.