Some Cool News From Lorna Dee Cervantes

Hey, thanks to Sheryl Luna, I discovered this review of my new book/s DRIVE: The First Quartet by the fine poet, Rigoberto Gonzales in the El Paso Times. Very cool. It was unexpected, but I was hoping -- I've been wondering what Rigoberto thought. He has to be, hand's down, the best new poet and writer out there.

[Oops, forgot to say that there's a typo in the last quoted line in my poem in the review. Someone typed "bowl" instead of "bow" -- the lines should read:

I was looking for your hair,
black as old lava on an island
of white coral. I dreamed it
deserted you and came for me,
wrapped me in its funeral ribbons
and tied me a bow of salt.

Oops. But wadddayagonnado?]

A new poem, "Mate and Love", appears in the new magazine of "new and cutting-edge" lit from UC Riverside, CRATE, in their "Monsters and Villains" theme issue. It's the first poem from this new manuscript of what I call "radical reconstructions" of poems in my first book, Emplumada, ESKELETONADA, to hit print. I call it my 250 dollar poem. I sent out a batch anonymously this last season, nearly all the poems from this manuscript, determined to place something from this more "experimental" manuscript. I have to put the scare quotes around that word, a term I don't usually think in (with?) -- not because I am adverse to experiment, but I don't get it, I live my life, as a Xican@ poet, in an entirely experimental biosphere. Isn't that what language and trying to communicate with it is? A series of experiments in crossing over? Well, some experiments are expensive. Hats off to you, play poets of the world. Play Poets of Experience. Why is it that every time we come up to bat the sun goes down? Or the rules are changed? Or everyone is tired of the game of making sense and god is dead and my taking offense is irrelevant to the greater goal of scoring one in the (w)hole? Why is it when I want me some of that hole, I get stuck back in the kitchen making the enchiladas? Where's ronnie burk when you need him? I like these poems. Besides being phanopetic, melopoetic and logopetic, they make a numenapoetic, to me. And, I just made that up. :-) But, check out the poem, and some good poets in this issue of CRATE. And if you come out scratching your head, well, I warned ya.

New news: If you're in Texas this fall, come check out the Southwestern Writers and Artists Festival at A & M University outside of Houston, October 24 - 26. I'll be giving a reading, among other things. I'd love to meet y'all. You know how I LOVE Texas. (links to follow)

And, this just in: I've been invited to be a guest blogger for a week for the Poetry Foundation. (!) You can now read one of my favorite poets, C. Dale Young, at the site, www.poetryfoundation.org -- just click on the link at the main site. I told them: I think my first post will be "To Voice Or Not to Voice - That is the Answer." Oops. Guess I just lost the gig.

Keep smiling. I think that's an imperative to the self -- myself.

Something to both shake my head and smile about: I was counting manuscripts and who to give them to this past week. I have no fewer than 15 new books!! 16 projects, most ready, if I count the music collaboration with pianist/composer, Gabriela Lena Frank for which I was just awarded a small grant from the Puffin Foundation. Cool. Very cool.

Keep smiling.

[Now I've got to go fix my fence and teach my kid how to swim.] [And, no, I didn't submit to Fence.]