Strange Places

ebb and flow

Posted by Daniela Elza on Dec 19 2009

Still here. Managing December. Negotiating the ebb and flow of events, deadlines, schedules and holiday spirit.
In between potlucks and christmas parties I have been trying to go to a reading or two here and there. The latest one was the TWS Reading Series on December 10th. It was lovely to hear so many talented poets that night. The Rhizome Cafe is a wonderful space, the staff dedicated and supportive of the event. The atmosphere is conducive and welcoming to poetry readings. The lighting subdued and warm. The food great. So support them if you are in the area. We need to nurture such spaces.

What’s up? A couple of things. Six poems went up on ditch,(a Canadian online poetry magazine celebrating the innovative, the non-conforming, the radical, the alternative, the surreal, the avant-garde, the non-linear, the abstract, the experimental).

And soon after I got an email from the Mountain View Cemetery requesting permission to put the negotiating with the dead poem up on their website. I would like to acknowledge here that the poem was first published in Matrix: The New Vancouver, Issue 84. I keep trying to get the acknowledgements out there, but for one reason or another it does not seem to make it up on the various websites. So thank you to the editors of this issue of Matrix, Anne Stone and Sachiko Murakami, and thanks to the staff at Mountain View for including my poem on their website. What better place for it than the place where it was born.