Lilliput Review in Your Pocket Day

Art by the incomparable Wayne Hogan

Poets. org, from the Academy of American Poets, has some interesting ideas, actually 30 of them, for celebrating National Poetry month. Two are of particular interest, I think. The first is something that Lillie has been promoting, by its very nature, since its inception: Poem in Your Pocket Day. And so AAP is advocating for April 17th to be Poem in Your Pocket Day and, if your at a loss of which poem to choose (there is a nice selection at the Poem in Your Pocket page that you can actually print out to fit in your pocket), why not choose an issue of Lilliput Review, which fits neatly in the pocket and, on average, has around 25 to 30 poems per issue.


Shameless self-promotion or national celebration? You decide.

It's always a pleasure to pass along new information concerning the work of Albert Huffstickler and there are two bits. First, at her librarian blog Speed of Light, Keddy Ann Outlaw has published a lovely collage entitled Retablo of Huff, along with the beautiful Huff poem entitled "Nostrum." This Huff post is a beauty, folded in as it is into an ongoing library project dealing with things Web 2.0.

In addition, on the Lillie homepage there are two new mp3 related Huff items. One is to a link at indieonestop.com to Huff reading "Intimacy", the other of Huff reading a poem entitled "Education". Hope you enjoy them.

There are two fine short poems worth a peak in the April 14th issue of the New Yorker : Michael Longley's powerfully ambivalent "In the New York Public Library" and Emily Moore's raucous "Auld Lang Syne." Great work if you can get it ... where to send can be found here.

This week's Lilliput poems come from issue #98, July 1998, pictured above. Let's start out with one of M. Kettner's always fresh and startling highkus:

#739

high
toenails with yellow polish
only buoy on the lake.

M. Kettner

What is Silence that I Fear It

When sound darkens into silence
I am drawn inward,
until trapped
as if between two mirrors.

Bruce Miller

Silence
is the haunting
voice of father,

what he didn't say,
how I keep hearing it.

Louis McKee

And this little nugget of wisdom, which perhaps might just as soon have seen its subjects switch places; though that most certainly would have been a different poem, different, too, is good:

Apologies to Mr. Shelton

Meditation will get you through
times of no bebop
better than bebop
will get you through
times of no meditation

W. T. Ranney

Until next week,
Don