Lit Bits & A Bit about Poetry Month

• As Mark Sarvas so nicely pointed out and Ed further linked (thank you both!), I've been covering the LA Times Book Prize nominees for LAist.  Sometimes I forget to tout my own stuff, so busy I am reading & reporting on everyone else's! Recent categories I've covered: Fiction, Biography and First Fiction. As I mentioned earlier, it's tough capturing an entire book's essence in a few sentences. Even more difficult when you consider the audience is less inclined to read these books than, say, the audience of this blog.  But we try and we cross our fingers and we hope that more people will read as a result of the coverage. (Ah, I see the LAist "we" is trickling over to Counterbalance. Must stay on top of that.) I'll be tackling the Young Adult nominees this week & a new writer at LAist will be posting a review of John Green's An Abundance of Katherines later this week.
• While I did an oh-so-brief (and oh-so-after-the-fact) review of Mitchell's Black Swan Green to round out the Fiction overview, Beth Kopley covered Mendelsohn's Lost for the Biography category, and Christine Ziemba covered Janis Cooke Newman's Mary for the First Fiction category.  We've got more coverage planned and I'll keep you posted.
• Los Angeles Noir is also big in LA this week (go figure) and a quick overview of the book & the many local reading events is also up at LAist.
• I've had the evening & the morning to deal with the loss of Vonnegut after my wholly inarticulate post from last night. The common theme, it seems, in all the excellent coverage being provided by lit bloggers, is our collective surprise at how much we feel we've lost.  It seems we didn't realize how much his work pushed us further in our early days of reading & writing.  While many are covering his reviews and his life and so much other good stuff, I think I'll jump back into his work and share my favorite passages later in the week. Stay tuned.
• As you are no doubt painfully aware by now, April is National Poetry Month and I've been posting a poem a day. Many of you have sent along your own favorite poems and I'll start posting those next week until the end of the month (still time and space to get yours in if you wish..)
• What has been fascinating to me about this daily typing up of a poem is how lovely it is. How meditative. I've purposely forced myself to do this each morning, rather than loading up my scheduled posts queue with a poem a day for the first two weeks of the month. While also a chore (I have to find one before I can tackle anything else for the day), I find that taking the quiet time each morning to browse my library, select a collection of poems and then select a poem has had an odd effect on me: I'm so much calmer. More appreciative of the day. Of the little moments. I had not expected this. I've never subscribed to the theory that a poem a day is the way to sanity or enlightenment or even better writing.  I may have to change my tune, alter my routine.  I will say it now, two weeks in: a poem a day is very good for the soul.