SAGE Featured for National Poetry Month!

I am thrilled to share that the SAGE project is featured on the terrific "Library as Incubator Project" website today as part of National Poetry Month. Click here to see it!

SAGE would never have been imagined without the people and resources at the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Leora, Ed, and Stace represent all that is inpiring about how libraries and librarians can be open to new ways to connect people to books. Even as we speak, they are getting ready to present "Rare Seeds, Creative Harvest: Artist Books Inspired by the Rare Book Collection", an exhibition that will feature not just the SAGE books but the process by which they came about. The exhibition opens May 18th. so any Chicago folks --check it out for me and report back! I'll be out in July with Claire Owen to teach some workshops.

Go out and say thanks to your favorite librarian!

Oh, and SAGE will be in our hands on Monday. Thanks for your patience and watch this space to get yours in the mail.

Invasive Biology

First, thanks for your patience as we wait for SAGE to come back from the printer. Thankfully, living in the nonprofit world has prepared me for troubleshooting on a budget! But really, it is AT THE PRINTER and it's not too late to pre-order a copy by emailing me here. These folks will get first dibs, hot off the presses in the next few weeks.

Last time, I wrote about how I write poems but didn't tell you that my real muse is Morning Edition on NPR right as the alarm goes off. More than a few poems have been inspired by that semi-awake state and an intriguing story on the radio. So with apologies to my friend and naturalist Liz Bradfield who will no doubt know that this image above is probably not the real English grass in the poem, here my somewhat abashed confession on this environmental conundrum.

Invasive Biology

I know I should be appalled

that English grasses are growing

in Antarctica --appalled

or at least alarmed -- how once more

humans have upended nature, bur

latched to pant leg, seed fallen

from the pages of a paperback last read

in a backyard in Surrey -- alarmed

or at least dismayed -- how tufts of green

cricket lawns dot this white island where

they decidedly do not belong -- dismayed

or at least concerned.

I should be appalled but instead I am

awed, mesmerized, uplifted -- how life

makes life wherever it finds itself,

the power of the faintest pulse.

How can I be dismayed when this is

what I want -- thaw in deep winter,

improbable color, the chance to inhale,

embed, enfold the exotic other.

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt 2012