1. I don't know why it got chosen, but How the Crimes Happened is a featured collection at the Poets at Work website.

2. I have a sonnet out in the new Aurorean--an example of those Shakespearean diary sonnets I was telling you about. This journal is edited by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, one of the sweetest-tempered editors I've ever corresponded with. I bet even her rejection letters are sweet.

3. According to Lucy Snowe, the main character of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, "There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest man, on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake." A similar sensation ensues if one is making popcorn in the school kitchen during a Harmony Elementary basketball game and meanwhile silently reciting Chaucer.

4. My friend Anne Bowman, who writes under the name Anne Britting Oleson, has just released a chapbook. If you attended the 2010 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, you'll remember that Anne was the participant who camped in the rain for the entire week. She also teaches high school English and has been introducing a poem a day to her students. You can read about both her poem project and her new chapbook on her blog.

5. Time for me to stop writing this and run downstairs to let the dog in. Bark bark bark bark. Such desperation. And in 10 minutes she'll be pacing the floors, longing with equivalent desperation to go outside again. Why are dogs always on the wrong side of the door?