if you read no other book this year, read:

Real Sofistikashun
Essays on Poetry and Craft
By Tony Hoagland

In these taut, illuminating essays, Tony Hoagland explores matters of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—in a buoyant conversational style less that of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner.

Graywolf Press

You can order it from Graywolf, or of you're local (Virginia) please order it from a local independent bookstore such as : The Fountain Bookstore, Book People, Carytown Books (4021 MacArthur Ave Richmond, VA 23227 (804) 261-7710, or whatever your favorite might be.

If we don't support the locals, they won't be there when we need them.

If you attend no other event this month, please go to:

Shann Palmer's One-Woman Show "Expedient Exaggeration"
art 6 Gallery, 6 East Broad St. Richmond, VA 23219
8:00 pm $5.00, cash bar and free eats (light snacks)

I'm busy working on my show for February 23rd- Expedient Exaggeration

soooo much to do!

but here's a little love thang from Poetry Hut

I have love poems for sale at the gallery (art 6)

yeah- here's one:

Tribute

The momentum of impulse
made common by nature’s design
explodes when she says
a kiss is just a kiss and he replies,
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry
our fortunes together
impetus sets lover’s loose to embrace
promises made before they can be
inculcated; mindless as the everyday
housewife daring to dream,
dancing with broom and swifter, alone.

At the precipice of reason, they bide
together holding each other in the dark,
eyes squeezed shut against temptation,
days tumbling by in the business of living,
work devouring passion, replacing heat,
their thermostat set at comfortable.

In the end, love wins, a kind of love born
from foolishness blossomed into custom.
Who else would want this old man, this
fragile woman? No one remembers
who they once were, how they finished
each others sentences, laughed at nothing,
made love in sunlight dazzled by beauty.

This is a HOOT-

chinese rejection

getting ready for First Friday (Feb 2) and my one-woman show (Feb 23)

art 6