The Rotary Dial is a 
downloadable journal edited by Alexandra Oliver, and I’m glad to say the May issue has a poem of mine called The Indestructible Old Man, if you’re able to take a look.
I’m in good company in the May issue, but I’ve been impressed with the journal from its beginnings, earlier this year. It’s available as a 99 cent download through Kindle, and you can like it on Facebook as a way to stay in touch with the project.
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Updated: The Lonely Offices
Recent updates to The Lonely Offices include poetry by 
Pino Coluccio (The Incredible Shrinking Man), Sandra Kasturi (Come Late to the Love of Birds), and John Donlan (For the Baysville Public School Reunion).
Also, in our first posted review Lori A. May takes a look at The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012.
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Time Of My Life
Canadian poet Chris Banks
has some very thoughtful things to say on the subject of time in poetry, and in particular quotes a few of my poems (“Someday the Men with Hats Will Go” happens to be one of my favourites from the new book).
Thanks, Chris, for the careful consideration of the book.
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For various reasons, I’m bringing Northern Poetry Review to a close. I’ve enjoyed producing the site, but began it nearly seven years ago with the assistance of web-maintenence man Jean Raco, who did a remarkable job and has been very professional. Blogs were not as attractive in 2006, and I wanted something more impressive. But Jean has also moved on to other work that’s keeping him much busier, even as I now have greater restrictions on my time, and finances.
But I still feel poetry suffers from shrinking amounts of attention, perhaps more than ever, so I’d like to introduce The Lonely Offices which takes its name from one of my favourite poems, Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. It’s also a somewhat playful reference to the solitude that comes with the act of writing, and the ongoing challenge of finding new readers. In any case, it’s a fresh start, and a project I can access much more easily. I look forward to posting poems more often than we saw on Northern Poetry Review, as well as other material. The new site is already updated with a Carmelo Militano interview of George Amabile, and I hope to post a poem soon. Have a look, and please do spread the word.
I’m open to speaking to somebody new about taking over Northern Poetry Review, but for now I’ll simply keep the site online for further reference. And my thanks, once again, to Jean for all your help with it. If I miss anything about it the most, it will be the little trees designed for the main page. Dani Couture was the friend willing to help me launch it, and I don’t think I’d have done it alone. Finally, if NPR managed to bring some attention to deserving poets, it’s thanks to the many people who took the time to write a review, do an interview, or contribute a poem. Many of the same, regular, wonderful contributors have already expressed an interest in the new site, so I’ll see you at the new place. The movers have been told to wrap all the breakables very carefully.
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Northern Poetry Review is updated with a review of Between Dusk and Night by Emily McGiffin, review by Lori A. May. And James Arthur provides a poem from his new collection Charms Against Lightning.
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Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
I’ve written before about how much I appreciate G. K. Chesteron (who has a great selected essays edited by Alberto Manguel) but more recently I’ve been enjoying Orthodoxy, a set of nine essays by Chesterton, amounting to a personal explanation of how he found Christianity. He’s quite good at relating counter-intuitive ideas, and while some aren’t illustrated well enough and simply wash over me — they’re closer to counter-intuitive statements — others give significant pause for thought. Here’s his explanation as to how softness and flexibility are strength, not their opposites. He goes on to suggest even more:
“The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.
Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages.
In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their natures sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or leviation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise into a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
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