Month: March 2012

The Big Poetry Giveaway 2012!

mariegauthier31 Comments

Tomorrow is April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, which means it’s once again time for the Big Poetry Giveaway, a blog event created and organized by Kelli Russell Agodon where poets and poetry lovers giveaway two books of poems on their blog. Please visit her blog to get the full list of participants.

To play, all you need to do is leave a comment on this post. Usually, I then choose the winners, using the Random Number Generator, on May 1, but since I’ll be in hospital with the new baby then, I probably won’t have the chance to post the winners until around May 7.

This year’s prizes include a chapbook and 4 journal subscriptions (1 year each):

Let the games begin!

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I forgot the “about me” segment… Since I began this blog 4 years ago, my life has gone through seismic changes. From running a wonderful indie bookstore to working for my favorite small press, babies (babies! Me!) (and still another to come!), and last year the loss of my mother, my grief over which has rather taken over the world since. I keep no hard and fast rules regarding what I write about here, except that I tend not to mention my husband too much because he’s not comfortable with that. I have a chapbook, but it’s not part of the giveaway because I don’t have any copies. I’ll amend that one of these days — I think my local indie down the road still has a couple. I’m selectively submitting my full-length manuscript to a few very particular presses and contests, so knock wood that I’ll hear good news on that front one fine day. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me, feel free to include that with your comment entry below!

When feeling no longer evades

mariegauthier5 Comments

Despite everything I knew and felt, two of my dearest friends died gasping for air. Another couldn’t stop her pain with morphine, so she disconnected her feeding tube. Still another has the same kind of cancer, and after a heartening remission it’s back with a vengeance. Two other friends are sitting with the niece and nephew, who have just had to pull the plug on their mother’s life support. All of them are sitting there at the mother’s bedside as I write, enduring the umpteenth day of death. It’s not a snap. My mother-in-law, while visiting us at our summer home last September, fell down the stairs at 2:00 am, alone, and died — she lay where we found her, five hours later, at the bottom of the stairs, in her moon-and-star pajamas. The idea of death is always a simile — old as the hills. It can’t hurt me. But the images have to be borne, and they are unbearable. In them, knowing and feeling fight for my soul, as if one or the other could win it. The evidences are as recalcitrant as they are unignorable. I suffer them as I will never suffer my own dying. In them, I feel the legacy of what befalls us — the Latin cadere, “to fall,” gives us all that “is the case” — casualty and cadaver too — and even grammatical case, as I was recently amazed to discover, comes not from the word meaning box but from the past participle of cadere, making nouns more fundamentally moving than we like to imagine.
…When feeling no longer evades, and thinking no longer avails, the two become woven together. You feel knowing can’t save you; you know feeling can’t save you. Their famous battles fall away, and in a flash or stretch, depending how things go with you, you do a lot at once: holding back while you hold forth, bearing down while you bear up.

–Heather McHugh, “Poise and Suspense,” from Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play, edited by Daniel Tobin & Pimone Triplett