further navel-gazing...

Mmm. My soon-to-be-grossly-distended-belly-button has been on much wider display of late than I had anticipated...

I wrote last week that my poem on my omphalus, Seven months: the navel-gaze, had been accepted for The Guardian Unlimited's Poetry Workshop April shortlist, which was thrilling enough, but since then an item about the shortlist appeared on Bookninja.

Apparently I'm supposed to rock on.

Following the Bookninja appearance, Steve Laidlaw of Kamloops, BC contacted me. He wanted to post my poem to his blog, called Riley Dog.

Though I would expect most of you to be familiar with BN, the mandate of Riley Dog is, in Mr. Laidlaw's words, to:

...highlight work like yours, as well as art or prose that I have found on the web and has knocked me out and I wanted to share. I've never kept archives much, so things just disappear after a couple of weeks or a month.

There is no attempt at an agenda, nor do the images or text have any relation to each other for any statement. The site has been going daily since late '99, but is now considered a blog since that explosion. It is a referenced url in the seminal Weblog Handbook.

Having had a gander at RD, I was again quite thrilled to be in such good company, so I agreed.

My poem, for those of you who aren't completely sick to death of it already, is up as of today...

Check it out, if you have a moment or two...

* * *

I'm equally thrilled/ambivalent about the end of the 2006 edition of the May Day Poetry Project.

Working with seven other poets as they worked through the season and their particular posting schedules, reading their poems and being read by them, was one of the things that kept me writing this month.

As always, with projects like this, I was enriched beyond the fact that I came away with a new clutch of poetry to pick at.

I knew some of the poets prior to the project and others I got to know, at least a little, through their poetry and comments.

So, in closing, I'd like to thank Tracy Hamon, Kerry Ryan, Bren Simmers, Myra South, Polly Washburn, Karla Andrich, and Paul Friesen for goddamn everything...especially as my last pre-labour-and-birth goal is to take the all-knocked-up poems I wrote and posted to MD and transform them into a chapbook ms.

I'm hoping to send it to Greenboathouse Books, one of Canada's spiffiest boutique chapbook publishers before their at-the-lake reading period ends (and also before I pop...).