Live poetry blogging on Thanksgiving [by Sharon Mesmer]

I was just reading Kim Severson's NYTimes live blog for today, and decided to steal her idea for here.  Good poets steal, ya know.  

11:08 — Kim Severson writes "Nothing says Thanksgiving morning more than the smell of celery cooking in butter."  Not for me.  For me it's the smell of scrambled eggs and hot dogs, because that's what Dad would cook for us because Ma had stormed downstairs to Grandma's after a fight.  But I guess that wasn't in the morning.  In the morning it was cigarettes and tension.

11:18 — The plan for today is to make cranberry-jalapeno salsa and head over to the beautiful home of poets and Lungfull! editors Brendan Lorber and Tracey McTague, across from Brooklyn's historic and beautiful Greenwood Cemetery.  We (my husband David and I) do this pretty much every year.  The gathering consists of poets, painters, comic book artists, creative types of various stripe, Tracey's relatives and, for the first time this year, B & T's baby girl, Aurora Morrigan.  No cigarettes and tension there.  Right now, tho, besides blogging, I'm just finishing an article about Elizabeth Smart's neglected prose poem masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, for Rain Taxi (read it here in case RT hates it: http://virginformica.blogspot.com/), and David is putting together a new New Yorker cartoon submission.  They've run, I think, nine of his cartoons so far, and I'd post a link to the New Yorker site for you all but I already tried that and the link is, like, four lines long.  Just Google "David Borchart + New Yorker."  I wish submitting poetry to the New Yorker was as fun as submitting cartoons.  Once you get your foot in the door, you go up to Robert Mankoff's office and actually present a portfolio of work to him -- in person.  Then you go out to lunch with all the other cartoonists.  Imagine doing that with Paul Muldoon!  One day I'll grow some balls and submit.  (Now there's a flarfy title: "Grow Some Balls and Submit".)

Comments

[David Nutt]

I regret I was not there. I thought you might be interested in poetry on French cheese.

David Nutt

[Thanksgiving 2021]

I love poetry, American poetry, English poetry, poetry in translation, even your poetry, and this is the best gosh darn blog I have found so far.