I’m caught up on work for my two-submissions-and-one-poem-per-rejection strategy, having celebrated my loss of The Normal Prize by assembling packages for Ploughshares and Barge and then drafting my first pantoum. (It’s pretty awful, but I may be able to work it into something passable eventually.) I’m considering getting slightly ahead of the game by putting together one more submission tonight to squeeze in under a May 31st deadline.

Mostly I’ve been busy with something peripherally related. Once I’d scraped that pantoum together, I jumped into a side-project: working up a sort of video presentation of a different poem that may or may not make an appearance at an upcoming variety show. Most likely if it is used, it’ll just be a print on the wall, but just in case there’s room for something a bit more intrusive, my goal is to have a five-minute video. I’ve already shanghaied a friend into agreeing to throw some music together.

The video is just the words of the poem animated in a sort of vaguely narrative interpretive dance, but I’m done(-ish) with the epigram and the first two of six stanzas, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. The existing footage clocks in at 1:43, so five minutes should be about right once there’s credits and the like. The show in question is in a little over three weeks’ time, so I don’t expect the deadline to be a big factor. We’ll see. I think I’m going to try to have the main animation done by the end of next weekend.

I also just finished reading Machine of Death and recommend it highly. I plan to submit at least one piece for the second volume.