Poetry Book Giveaway — The Results Are In!

A big thank you to everyone who entered my NaPoWriMo Poetry Book Giveaway — and thanks as well to those who also checked out some of the poem drafts I posted over the course of this busy month!  I can’t believe it’s May already . . .

So, per one of Kelli Russell Agodon’s suggestions, I used the Random Number Generator to generate two numbers between 1 and 46, which was the number of comments responding to my Giveaway post.  The winner of the first book (my own a half-red sea) is “TotalFeckinEEjit” (clever spelling!).  The winner of the second book (Mackey’s Splay Anthem) is Tara Mae Schultz.  Congrats to you both!!

I’ll be emailing the winners immediately for their mailing addresses.  I hope the rest of you (unlike me — 😦 ) won books on other blogs’ giveaways!  At the very least, we’ve all read some great poems on NaPoWriMo-participating blogs, I’m sure, and/or equipped ourselves with a list of new names of poets/poetry collections we want to check out at the library or local bookstore.  And what more could a poet and lover of poetry want??  Winning free books is just icing . . .

I’ll be back here again next year, in all likelihood, to celebrate National Poetry Month with a poem-a-day (or something close).  🙂  Meanwhile, if you want, you can keep up with me — what I’m reading, teaching, and writing (about), as well as my upcoming readings — at my year-’round blog over in the Red Room.

Happy May Day, good people!

Peace.

poem #18 (a 31-word prose poem)

arizona holds no brief for mlk day or the possibly sans papiers. will mccain’s daughter—no, the other one—be among those pulled over for driving while brown? i’m reasonably suspicious.

[According to the folks at Color of Change.org: “Last week, Arizona passed a new law that makes racial profiling legal and, in effect, requires police to stop people based on their race and ethnicity.  Arizona’s new law, SB 1070, says that police must question anyone they have “reasonable suspicion” of being an undocumented immigrant. Translation: police can now stop and harass people for no other reason than that they are brown-skinned or speak Spanish.”

I know it makes no sense that I use the French term for undocumented immigrants, rather than the Spanish, but I don’t know the Spanish term! (Well, that, and I love the rhyme…)  If anyone knows enough Spanish to help me, please leave a comment. :-)]

[*Update*: You can sign a petition to boycott Arizona in protest of this new law here.]

Poetry Book Giveaway!

Greetings!  Here’s another post (like the one below introducing NaPoWriMo) that will stay up all month.  I’m participating in a Poetry Book Giveaway, initiated by Kelli Russell Agodon, also in honor of National Poetry Month.  Unlike the poem-a-day challenge, this is one form of participation I feel certain I can see through to the end!  🙂

I’ll be giving away two books:

1) The first lucky winner will receive a copy of my book, a half-red sea.  You can check out some reviews of it here and here.

2) And the second luckier winner will receive a copy of a book by one of my favorite poets, Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award in Poetry in 2006.  It’s the latest section of his ongoing serial poem “Song of the Andoumboulou.”  Read more about it here and here.

All you have to do is leave a comment to this post saying that you’d like to be entered and giving me your name and an email address or blog URL, so that if you win I can contact you for your mailing address.  Please be sure to leave your comment on this post and not any of my poem-a-day posts, because I delete those on a daily basis.  The winners will be chosen from among this post’s comments stream, using a random number generator.  I will determine and announce the winners on Saturday, May 1st.  All entries through midnight on April 30th will be eligible!

Thanks to Kelli for this idea, which is circulating among several poets — you can find others who are also hosting giveaways by going to Kelli’s site and checking her left sidebar for links to all participating bloggers.

Happy National Poetry Month!  And may the luckiest entrants win!

NaPoWriMo (or, April is the prolific-est month…)

Greetings!  Thanks to Robin Reagler, I’m going to start down this garden path, but I have little hope of getting to that gorgeous rosebed of 30 poems by April 30th.  : )

Still . . .   I am celebrating a little mini-milestone of sorts, and this is my reward.  So while what goes up on this blog may be more appropriate for NaHaiWriMo (which is to signify the potentially tiny size of the drafts and fragments that will appear here), it will be my pleasure.  Won’t you join me?

I’ll be leaving each day’s draft up only until I post the next one — no permanent archive of drafty poems to float around the web!  So check back often — and do leave a word of encouragement.

Today’s poem is yet to come…