Bookin' with Bingo

NO APRIL FOOL HERE!

This is the real deal...Introducing the new look

BOOKIN' WITH BINGO!

I like the ease of it, and yes there is still some work to do, but just little bells and whistles and lists to take care of. I want to thank Tiffini at THAT BLOG PLACE.com! She is a genius, has the patience of Job as working with non-techy me is like, well, I am sure she has pulled her hair out but do visit her site at www.thatblogplace.com. She does amazing work! I explained what I wanted and she created it and made it happen!

I hope you all like it and will bear with me the next few days as I settle in and handle a few little kinks I have to deal with since I created them! I also hope you will spend some time looking around. I have that great Laura Griffin Giveaway going until Monday, April 6.

On a sad note, we did not make it to 100 followers by today BUT it will happen soon and in fact, wouldn't it be sweet if it coincides with my 100th POST?! WOW! NOW THAT WILL BE BIG!! WATCH FOR IT AND THE GIVEAWAY TO CELEBRATE!

But for today, I want to introduce a special April Feature...Poetry Month!

Welcome to National Poetry Month, April!

This year, Knopf’s poem-a-day celebration is dedicated to the memory of John Updike (1932-2009), who remained loyal to the art of poetry throughout his career as a brilliant and popular practitioner of the short story and the novel, and as perhaps the most generous and eminent literary critic of our time. In keeping with Updike’s almost magical ability to greet the typewriter with a joyous sense of purpose every working day, he ended his life writing: his final collection of poems, Endpoint, contains some poems written during the last days of his illness, in a spirit of gratitude and clear-eyed summation. The volume includes a characteristically Updikean mixture of serious and light verse, of sonnets and contemporary songs, as he opens the rich store of his inner self once more for our perusal and understanding.

Today’s selection is John Updike’s “Half Moon, Small Cloud.”

Half Moon, Small Cloud Caught out in daylight, a rabbit’s transparent pallor, the moon is paired with a cloud of equal weight: the heavenly congruence startles. For what is the moon, that it haunts us, this impudent companion immigrated from the system’s less fortunate margins, the realm of dust collected in orbs? We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind, not burning too close like parents, or too far to spare even a glance, like movie stars. No star but in the zodiac of stars, a stranger there, too big, it begs for love (the man in it) and yet is diaphanous, its thereness as mysterious as ours. Visit the Poem-A-Day site here to listen to a tribute reading of the poem by the New York Times writer-at-large Charles McGrath, a friend of John Updike's who will also be the reader on the audio edition of Endpoint, soon to be available digitally.