Last night I read the three poems I entered into UNL Amnesty’s poetry contest and Demand Dignity benefit concert at Meadowlark Coffee & Espresso. I posted two videos on YouTube.

The funny thing about technology is that one always wants to try something new. For this reading, I was a little worried that the sound from the steamer for the milk and the coffee grinder would overpower the bands and the poets. Also, I wasn’t sure what kind of sound system would be set up to amply voices. So, to make a long story short, I used a wireless mic with the video camera and then synced the audio from the mic to the video for a clearer audio. I think it turned out great for this new experiment with recording.

Technology aside, it was great reading and a fantastic turnout. I’m really glad I had this opportunity to participate in raising $$$ for an important cause.

Reading (poetry) in UNL Amnesty’s Demand Dignity benefit concert
8:00 p.m., Saturday, January 28, 2012
Meadowlark Coffee & Espresso, 1624 South St., Lincoln, NE 68502

I hope to see you there!

In other contest and award news, forthcoming in my chapbook THE PUPPET WIFE, my piece “Pantomime: A Tragedy” was selected for the 2011 “Best of Spittoon” award, which includes an actual spittoon. I get a spittoon. They’re going to send me a spittoon. How cool is that? My father had a few spittoons around the house when I was a kid and I always thought they were kind of neat and a little bit sinister. I’m very excited to get my own.

In other news, I’m up in UNL’s January newsletter. I have poems in the current issues of Miller’s Pond, in the anthology Sunrise from Blue Thunder, the anthology Flashlight Memories (now available in ebook), and forthcoming in ABZ and The Adroit Journal.

Bloggers over in The Modcloth Blog discussed their love of chapbooks and posted this lovely picture of recent chaps they’ve been reading.

I’m delighted to see my little chapbook MY IMAGINARY in the bottom left hand corner.

Finally, late last year I created a BRANDING GIRLS giveaway on Goodreads.

What is the coolest, craziest, and most unbelievable thing is the number of people who have entered to win. As of right now as I’m typing this blog post, there are 203 people requesting a copy of BRANDING GIRLS. 203! My press run was only 250. I’m very sure I’ve sold 47+ copies. I don’t think there are 203 copies available. The contest ends in March, but it’s 203 and counting. Amazing.

I’m set to read at the Opening and Reception for Belles Lettres. Here’s the info I have right now:

Reading (poetry) in the Belles Lettres Opening
7:00-10:00 p.m., Friday, March 2, 2012
Altered Esthetics, 1224 Quincy Street NE, Minneapolis, MN

 

Show (poetry) Broadside Collaboration with artwork by Kate Renee
March 1– 29, 2012
Belles Lettres, Altered Esthetic, Minneapolis, MN

I’m so excited! My poetry will be in an art gallery, on a wall, illuminated with flattering lighting, and people who are carrying around little drinks and snacks will get to stand before it and gaze with their artistic eyes. I will be one of those people and I will be thrilled.

Here’s Kristin:

In The Puppet Wife, Laura Madeline Wiseman skillfully and subtly traces the strings that tie, the ties that bind, the knots and tangles, between language and line, man and woman, fish and fisher, poem and reader. These poems lay bare a lyric hope and tense, mutable codependence among “the guy with the strings,” “the guy [who] is the strings” and the guy who is “made of strings.”  Intricately woven from beginning to end, The Puppet Wife is a provocative, unsettling delight to read.

Yay! Thanks, Kristin!

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s latest chapbook of poems, The Puppet Wife, draws the reader into a mesmerizing and sometimes haunting world, a puppet’s stage where fear lurks in shadowy corners. Eerily familiar objects—strings, fish lines, ropes, scarves ribbons, fish hooks, door hooks, knots, and fasteners—are transformed as the girl who never speaks becomes a woman. With courage and with hope, Wiseman redefines and articulates what it means to live and love authentically.

Thanks!

Here’s Jim:

She Who Loves Her Father is poetic archaeology, a careful search for “that thing // so unheard of, the source of the Nile / or the answer the sphinx longs for.” Laura Madeline Wiseman’s poems find Eve (without Adam) making tea in a kitchen, Isis in the shape of a housecat, and sphinxes “nestled among the trees” who “lope toward homes made of rock.” Wiseman’s poems are cryptic in the etymological sense of crypts—they are odes to both containers and the things contained: family and daughter, stomach and food, womb and fetus. In the operation of these poems, sutures both bind and burst, bandages protect and consume. Screams turn into whispers and a dead language comes back to life in this book of riddles, where opposites swap places: “I want it to be yesterday. Then, I can mourn properly, twist it inside my mind to see how it was to me now. But I’ve got to get gone first.”

Thanks, Jim!

So how do you get something FREE? Contact me through my website and I’ll send to the first five people which one of the following chapbooks or broadsides (that I have in stock) that you want:

• My Imaginary
• Ghost Girl
• Branding Girls
• Posturing Broadside
• The Gift Broadside

All you have to do is contact me via the contact page, tell me you checked out my new website, list your mailing address, and what you want, and I’ll get it in the mail.  This is just a big thank you for 2011 and a hello to 2012! Who else will give you something FREE today to celebrate the new year?