Blogroll

As the old Tom Paxton song goes,

Are you going away
With no word of farewell...

Well, that's what he upped and did. Though he did announce his intentions the previous week..

Good luck this summer, Eduardo, with the manuscript. I look forward to seeing your new website in the fall.

This made me realize -- time to update my blogroll.

Since the last time, some people have moved out of the fave's list, some into it. Those who've moved in: Anne Haines (Land Mammal) is as warm and terre-a-terre as pomme de terre comfort food in a howling winter for fellow "emerging" poets, especially fellow middle-aged "emerging" poets like myself... a number of her posts (particularly on writers' groups) I've found very useful; AJPL is a bright young fella I have a lot of intellectual fun with so I find myself frequently curious to see what he's up to; Anthony Robinson has moved his blog back out of retirement and has proven to be very poignant and very engaging in his commentary, so up he goes. Emily Lloyd, always worthy, is back into the crowd of "Other Worthies" until she decides what she's doing with her blog, which should be soon, she tells us; Cris Lott (Cosmopoetica), because although I like his writing, he doesn't post frequently enough.

C Dale, you're great, your tips have been invaluable and your insights superior-- but you're on probation. Seems to me your blog has become rather too much a diary blog lately. But I still find myself dropping in on Avoid the Muse every few days...

A big addition to the blogroll: a list of on-line magazines (I'll only hyperlink some of these; I'm getting tired...). Listed alphabetically, it includes some very high-level "establishment" ones, like Slate and Blackbird (the latter strikes me as rather an online version of American Poetry Review -- everyone there is very much a "career" poet, MFA'd, Breadloafed, etc.), the conservative looking Melic Review, which looks at least at first glance like an online Poet Lore; The Page, which besides being a voluminous review has an impressive links list of other online poetry publications; then dignified/funky lit zines like How 2, Rock Salt Plum, 42 Opus, Verse, and the cute and terribly pink No Tell Motel; finally post avant hipster reviews like Shampoo, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket and Malleable Jangle (the latter two out of Australia, incidentally). Quite an assortment. This is as much as anything else to help my own exploration ... if they're at my fingertips, maybe I myself will get to know them better and eventually submit to some of them! (Having them bookmarked hasn't been enough).

Other important resources (under Other Poetry Websites): Poetry Net, a great online selection of important contemporary poets, with bios, pictures, etc; and (what an oversight not to have this until now), the Quebec Writer's Federation website.

By the way, yesterday my site meter recorded this blog's 4,000th visit since last September when I set up "digs" here. Seems things are picking up exponentially; the month of May saw exactly (yes, exactly!) 1,000 of those.