Blogs

A Poetry Month blogger more responsible than me would probably use this post to remark on the recently announced shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize ? among the most lucrative and exciting poetry prizes going. Instead, I am going to fixate on a typographical symbol.

(?Responsible Poetry Month blogger? is an oxymoron anyway. But I do extend virtual kisses-on-the-cheek to all of the shortlisted poets and the lone poet-translator. It is one of the unlisted perks of being shortlisted.)

If you were following the news last month, chances are you read about the cat parasite, which induces in its hosts a variety of eccentric traits and symptoms helpful to cats and harmful to babies. (In women, these traits reportedly include a willingness to drink suspicious liquids and to adopt stray cats.

The Poetry Month poetry events have been proliferating exponentially, rodent-style. Each night I go to sleep (or don?t, as the case may be), and by morning another five/twenty-five/one hundred twenty-five have appeared.

Eran Ben-Joseph, author of the spectacularly titled Rethinking A Lot: the Design and Culture of Parking, recently wrote in the New York Times that ??parking lots are a 'found' place: they satisfy needs that are not yet met by our designed surroundings.?

The first of April, while perhaps better known as the day someone might fill your squeezable honey jar with dish soap, or the day you can perform ?really advanced? google searches for rhyming slang, subtext, innuendo, grammatical faux pas, looping midi music, and other goodies, is also the start of National Poetry Month.