5 for Friday

Friday and time for five in honor of the 5th day of the week.

1 - We'll send you to visit with a new contributor to the Joyful Jubilant Learning blog, April Groves. April is a realtor, mother of four down in Georgia, and writer of two blogs: Making Life Work for You and My Beautiful Chaos.

2 - On the Billy Collins trail, we find Amy King currently teaching and writing in NY. Her blog can be found here. A link to four of her published poems can be found here.

3 - Also on the Billy Collins trail, we find Grub Street's Penny Dreadful blog:

grub street is a non-profit writing center dedicated to nurturing writers and connecting readers with the wealth of writing talent in the Boston area. We have two vital roles. We support writers at every stage of their development by offering writing classes, fellowships, employment, and networking opportunities, and by promoting the work of local authors. Equally important, we enrich the lives of Boston-area residents by introducing them to a community of fellow readers and writers through author-hosted book clubs, informal discussions, movie screenings and more. grub street builds on Boston's proud literary tradition by making the city more welcoming for writers, and more inspiring and culturally alive for all of us.

4 - Continuing the Billy Collins trail, we end up traveling from East coast to West coast to find C Dale Young in San Francisco writing at Avoiding the Muse:

I currently practice medicine full-time, serve as poetry editor of the New England Review, and teach in the Warren Wilson MFA Program . My books of poetry are The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001) and The Second Person (Four Way Books, Spring 2007).

5 - Finally, going to the southern coast we find Katie Kidder writing at The Poet's Lounge in New Orleans.

A venue for poetry, literature, and all things of entertainment and interest.

Katie wrote a poem about her muse:

Oh, it's so bad
to get stuck with a muse you don't want.
Why couldn't I have been assigned Bobby Frost's muse,
or someone with something like grace?


Mine belches and scratches her ass in the hall.
She has the sickly sweet smell of children
and stale Nilla Wafers, as though she was sprung
from the foam of the sofa.


She grabs at my smokes during the two-point conversion,
and she swims in my wine like a gnat.
I trip over her, by the bed, reading Plath on the floor
at six in the morning when I get up for tea.


My muse is nothing like me.
She waxes perverse in the thighs of thin blondes
when we've a perfectly good blonde at home.
And that bitch burns my old lovers' letters
and makes up her face with the ashes.


Kissing my muse, I imagine,
is like swallowing a mouthful of honey and rust,
and twisting your legs in her legs in the cold comfort of dark
is like spooning, in the sea, on the rag, with a shark.


My muse works with the mercy of bullets, falling.



Enjoy!