Take a Left Turn at July, Then Straight On to Labor Day.

Attention Poets (You Know Who You Are!)

April is National Poetry Month and to mark the occasion Alimentum Journal: The Literature of Food is again publishing menupoems. For this project Alimentum is seeking your poems, about a dozen of which will be selected. Selected poems are distributed to participating restaurants so that diners may enjoy reading poetry while reading the menu.

Here are the guidelines:

Short menu- dining-food- related poems.
12-line length limit.
3-poem submission limit.
Deadline-March 4th, 2009. (March Forth!)
Email submission to menupoems@alimentumjournal.com

IMPORTANT- Poems must be pasted into the body of the email, no attachments.

Menupoem examples can be found here.

Thus far I have one menupoem completed for submission. It's a fun subject; give it a try! At a minimum, my memupoems will be published here in April despite vague concerns about feeling like an April Fool. My friend artist Michael Taylor once said to me, 'it's not art until you allow other people to see it.' Michael and artist Virginia Hall have an exhibit opening March 8, 2009, called sensei chic and the seven deadly sins.

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem

To a day of wonderful, emotional, and historic events add hearing Elizabeth Alexander recite her poem this morning. Here, via CQ Politics, is the poem's text in full:

Praise Song for the Day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national.

Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.