Sturgeon's Law

It's funny how the same names keep turning up over and over. Right now, congratulations are going around the blogs for a number of people who just got chosen to be in this Best New Poets 2005 anthology and who are also in journals that blog people run like The New Hampshire Review, 32 Poems, etc. Well, a lot of those same people have been in The Eleventh Muse too, either last year or in the upcoming issue (or both). So, my congratulations to Steve Mueske, Sandra Beasley, and Clay Matthews, all of whom are in the next Muse (Steve was in the previous one too), and all of whom are really good writers whose work I've seen all over the place. Congratulations also to Carrie Jerrell, whom I met at West Chester and whose poetry I hope one day to publish in the Muse as well. (Insert smiley here.)

I didn't enter the competition (probably should have), not because of any modesty but because I didn't see the announcement until just before the deadline. Next year I'll nominate poets out of the Muse and probably self-nominate for that portion of the competition too, assuming I don't yet have a book (a safe assumption, I think).

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In "I need some good news outside of poetry right now" good news, I finished 3rd out of 45 in a No Limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament this weekend, which is the best I've done in a tournament of that size.