Poems from The Journey to Kailash
Mike Allen / April 18th, 2011 / 1 Comment »
Defacing the Moon
Your ship’s sharpened keel slides across airless seas, blown by the breath of your desires. Those sails stretch like skin to catch the winds of your whimsy, and the keelblade carves crags into cheekbones and eyes. Soon your own face will rise from the moon’s far side, awaken and stare down the sun.
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Journey to Kailash posts begin tomorrow
Mike Allen / April 17th, 2011 / No Comments »
Tomorrow, in honor of National Poetry Month, I’m running a series of posts containing selected poems from my 2008 poetry collection, The Journey to Kailash. They’ll appear at 9:30 a.m. every morning for the next 13 days, with a very appropriate choice appearing on the 13th and final day. Each one will have an accompanying audio reading.
I hope you get a kick out of these dark and quirky musings.
A basket filled with Goblin Fruit
Mike Allen / April 14th, 2011 / No Comments »The Spring issue of Goblin Fruit just sprouted up. See for yourself:
I note: subscribers to Mythic Delirium are eligible for prizes in their 5th Anniversary Prize Drawing.
If you’re not a subscriber, click here for some reasons why maybe you ought to be.
Because it deserves to be said again
Mike Allen / April 13th, 2011 / 2 Comments »Congratulations to these poets with work from Mythic Delirium in contention for the 2011 Rhysling Awards:
- Jennifer Crow, “We Took Our Gods”, Issue 21, January 2010
- Lyn C. A. Gardner, “Midnight Posture”, Issue 23, Summer/Fall 2010
- Shweta Narayan, “Cave-smell”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
- Jane Yolen, “The Gospel of the Rope”, Issue 23, Summer-Fall, 2010.
short poem category
- F. J. Bergmann, “Occidental”, Issue 23, Summer-Fall 2010
- C. S. E. Cooney, “Ere One Can Say It Lightens”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
- Joshua Gage, “Rats”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
- Jaime Lee Moyer, “Rain Face”, Issue 21, January 2010
- Catherynne M. Valente, “Red Engines”, Issue 21, January 2010
long poem category
Swiped from the original post at The Plasteel Spider Factory.
A mindbending poem for Poetry Month, and a question answered
Mike Allen / April 11th, 2011 / 6 Comments »You could call this the soft announcement of my new homepage.
The question I’m answering is, why “Descent Into Light”? Well, because there have always been too many Mike Allens in the world, the phrase “Descent into Light,” snipped from my poem “Phase Shift,” has been the name of my author homepage since 2003, which came about when I checked out fellow poet Christina Sng’s Webpage and decide that, wow, I ought to have one of those, too.
Since then it’s gone through many permutations. The most recent version was wild to look at and had neat Flash features, but was incredibly cumbersome to update, which meant I almost never did it. People who looked at the page to see what I was up to (and who didn’t know to peek at my LiveJournal, “The Plasteel Spider Factory,” named after yet another snip from one of my poems) would look and assume I was out of commission, when the truth was more or less the opposite.
I’ve done most of my public online living on LiveJournal since late 2005 — but have been frustrated by recent connectivity problems, and the template I use there doesn’t really serve me well in terms of using it for a homepage. I need my page to be the pixellated equivalent of the long and elaborate presentation I have to do to explain to people what sort of writer and artist I am. After twenty years of going about everything in the most circuitous and impractical way possible, I don’t fit in any categorical boxes, really. So it’s hard to convey exactly what I do unless I can just lay all of it in front of you.
Which, at last, is what this completely new and hopefully much more active version of my old site does, thanks to WordPress. I haven’t yet figured out what its relationship will be to my LiveJournal, whether I’ll import that here or crosspost this there or what, as I can’t seem to get my LiveJournal to talk to anything at the moment except Twitter. I guess eventually I’ll figure it all out.
And while I leave that matter as a cliffhanger, I’ll end with this. I’ve had many potential publications not come to fruition over the years, but this particular one, a poetry postcard line that didn’t happen, at least left me with this beautiful image of my poem “Phase Shift,” originally from Tales of the Unanticipated, which I share with you now in honor of National Poetry Month. My thanks to artist Bob Freeman for giving my words some extra umph.
