Duhamel & Carbo - At Butler University Feb 16

Visiting Writers Series

• Poets Denise Duhamel and Nick Carbó, 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16, Robertson Hall Johnson Room. Duhamel's books of poetry include, most recently, "Two and Two," which features a long poem about 9/11 constructed from words people posted on the Internet immediately afterward. Carbó, her husband, most recently published "Andalusian Dawn," a book of poems, and edited "PinoyPoetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics."

For more information, call (317) 232-1878

Butler University . 4600 Sunset Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46208

This moment...

brought to you by diet coke.

Avoidance

Cast iron rims encrusted in clay
appealing to the masses.
Don't go there-
the crowd caters to the mindset
of Yogi Berra.
I read the boxscore daily.
The body count,
and the game goes on.
We're in extra innings
you know.

Yesterday

Yesterday I was not feeling well.

I did not write.

Did not read.

Did not make an appearance at the WP Open Mic.

There are times...

When no other words will do.

The Night Stand Game

HOLLYWOOD has been boosting sales in a very unlikely area: poetry books. Sales of two poetry books, one by Elizabeth Bishop and another by E.E. Cummings, more than doubled in some stores in the last month after actress Cameron Diaz read works by the two great American poets in the movie "In Her Shoes."

WHAT are you reading? An inventory of my night stand currently has the following:

• Early Occult Memory System of the Lower Midwest - B.H. Fairchild
• Conamara Blues - Poems - John O'Donohue
• The Poetry of Pope John Paul II - Roman Triptych Meditations
• A Company of Readers - W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lional Trilling
• Her Husband - Hughes and Plath - A Marriage - Diane Middlebrook
• Sylvia Plath - A Critical Study - Tim Kendall
• Wintering - Kate Moses
• Oh Sweet Dancer - W.B. Yeats and Margot Ruddoch Correspondence - Roger McHugh
• John Ashbery - Selected Poems - John Ashbery
• The Best American Poetry 2005 - edited by Robert Pinsky

The last book... I picked it up at Barnes & Noble yesterday while browsing there with my wife. Cathy brought it to me and I flipped through it and proclaimed it a gem! The irony of this is that poetry is not really her thing. It has a really good and quite varied selection from a number of very outstanding journals. That I recall off the top of my head - The Hudson Review, Poetry, Sycamore Review, Slate, Ploughshares, New Letters, 32 Poems, Fence and of course The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly just to name a few.

So, what's on your night stand?

Poetry

You are what you write...

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote." ~Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor, 1982

I'm presently working on a self-portrait poem - hence I found this quote to be relevant.