Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "zeitgeist-press"

I've been flying all day because the Lambda Literary Awards announced their finalists, and my poetry book The Horizontal Poet made the cut! I've been invited to read on June 3 at Bi Lines in New York City and to attend the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony on June 4 at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue) with an after-party at Slate (54 West 21st Street).

The Lammies are the most prestigious LGBT writing awards in the U.S.A. I would love to go to the ceremony, but I'm a disabled woman with a small pension, so it's going to be tricky. If I can sell enough copies of my book between now and May, I think I can afford the trip. If you would like to help me get there, you can order signed copies of my poetry book *The Horizontal Poet* (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), one of this year's finalists, by sending $14 + $2 shipping (in U.S.) per copy via PayPal to Jmsteckel at aol dot com, or via check to Jan Steckel, PO Box 18797/Oakland, CA 94619. :)

For more details about the awards and a complete list of categories and finalists, including a lot of great reads, see
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/foundat...

I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a believer, either. Nor am I an agnostic, if you take the definition of agnostic to mean someone who believes it's impossible to know if God exists or not. I just know that I personally don't know if God exists. I don't have any problem with other people's beliefs in God. Evangelical, militant atheism mildly annoys me.

Nor do I find it as important to be sure about God's existence as many people do, because I'm pretty sure that the humanistic morality my parents taught me leads me to behave in the same way as I would if I were sure about God's existence. Don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated, as Hillel put it. Safer and less prescriptive than the Golden Rule,

Want a quick turnaround time for a poem, essay or story to be published? I woke up to find four poems I had submitted last night to The Eloquent Atheist were posted this morning! The last poem in the group is about Joie Cook, one of the best performers and poets I know personally. She's another Zeitgeist Press author and lives in San Francisco.

http://www.eloquentatheist.com/2012/0...

What is the basis of your conscious behavior and morality, whether you believe in God or not?

I'm delighted to announce that my first full-length poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), recently won a Lambda Literary Award. The "Lammies" are the premier annual international awards for LGBT writing.

While they were announcing the award before mine in Manhattan two weeks ago, a beautiful blonde woman said something to me that I couldn't hear. I didn't realize until she was introduced onstage that she was our own Amy King, moderator of the Goodreads Poetry group! Luckily, I got to shake her hand and thank her when I went onstage to accept my award. What an honor.

The Horizontal Poet is now available on Amazon and at the following fine independent bookstores: The Laurel Bookstore in Oakland, California; The Beat Museum in San Francisco, California; Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara, California; and Bluestockings in New York City.

You can also order the book directly from its indie publisher Zeitgeist Books at www.zeitgeist-press.com. If you prefer a signed copy, you can order one from me for $14 plus $2 shipping ($16 total) as a check or money order sent to Jan Steckel/PO Box 18797/Oakland, CA 94619, or for $16 sent to me via PayPal to Jmsteckel at aol dot com. Be sure to include your mailing address and to whom you want the book signed.

The cocktail reception before the Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony was a gas. I knew I should be running around trying to meet publishers or agents, but I was mesmerized by all the different sparkly eyeliners people were wearing. I got interviewed for some sort of promotional video for the Lambda Literary Foundation and tried to say all the right things.

Just before the awards ceremony started, someone kicked my husband out of his seat in the auditorium so Kate Millett could sit in it. Of course, he was happy to give it to her. I lay on the floor in a little alcove to the left of the stage where they had put me, and nearly got tripped over by Armistead Maupin. Kate Clinton shook my hand, and I decided never to wash it again. In her remarks, she said that the Republicans wanted to shrink government down small enough to fit inside her uterus.

When they announced that The Horizontal Poet had won an award, I swore softly to myself in shock and mounted the stairs to the stage. They had projected a thirty foot image of the book's cover on a screen behind me, so there I was stammering in front of a Brobdingnagian image of my seminude buxom self while four hundred people applauded. Except now I'm forty pounds lighter and have chopped off my hair, so I looked like a skinny-assed white boy in a black leather jacket and glasses. It was kind of like one of those dreams where you forget to wear any clothes to school.

I thanked all the requisite people and staggered off the stage into the arms of a six-foot-tall Olympian goddess, her bare shoulders rising from her brocade peplum bodice like Venus on the half-shell: my heroine Susie Bright. Then a long clinch with my husband Hew. The rest of the program had an air of unreality, but since the bisexuals and the transgendered people usually come last at queer events, there wasn't too long to wait. Then tons of hugs, congratulations, photos, handshakes, more awkward thanks, and into the cool night air.

I have two bags full of swag, mostly books by other queer writers that I'm really looking forward to reading. I have an enormously dense hunk of glass in the shape of a book, engraved with the relevant particulars. If I ever win another of these, I can use them for bookends. I have the knowledge that I really moved those judges with words on a page, without any junkets or publicist or connections. I know what my beautiful hunk of glass is. It's a license to write.

Halloween is my wedding anniversary. Hew and I went to Luka's Taproom in midtown Oakland to celebrate. Afterward we lit candles in our front window around a sugar skull we bought Sunday at the Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebration in the Fruitvale, our exuberant Latino ghetto. A sky gravid with rain (or perhaps the per capita murder rate) kept the usual few trick-or-treaters away this year, leaving us a satellite-dish-sized bowl of Snickers and Milky Ways on the coffee table. The tiny candy bars sing siren songs to me now from the living room, but I'll stop my ears with foam earplugs and lash myself to the headboard.

Several years ago, I wrote this Halloween poem, "Luminaria," for Hew. Valyntina Grenier was kind enough to publish it in her online journal Back Room Live . Valyntina is a talented artist and poet with an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California. She has shown her visual art in solo and group exhibitions in Oakland and Tucson. She curated the Oakland reading series Back Room Live, from which her journal drew its inspiration.

Watching on today's news patients being evacuated from Bellevue Hospital in New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy reminds me so of this poem I wrote after Hurricane Katrina, "Charity after the Hurricane." It's about Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where my grandfather Morris Steckel trained to be a general practioner. The poem was published online by Kemble Scott in SoMa Literary Review and in my first chapbook, The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006).

My heart goes out to everyone in the waterlogged states.

Charity after the Hurricane

Hydrocephalus Boy is doing okay.
His shunt’s the only thing that’s draining around here.
The gomer with the Marines tattoo boxed his beans.
Guy hasn’t peed in two days,
and we got no dialysis,
no power,
no suction,
no lights.
Rick’s sewing people up by flashlight in the OR
since the ER’s an aquarium.
Jeannie’s suctioning green crap
out of the Funny Looking Kid’s trach
with an ear-bulb and a syringe.
Looks like a giant turkey-baster.
Kid’s circling the drain.
We’ve been bag-ventilating the guy
with Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome
since Monday. We take turns.
My hands ache.
No more water to drink, but if you’re thirsty,
I can put in an IV and fill up your tank.
You look like an easy stick.
You want potassium in that, doctor?
Got no coffee, but there’s Ritalin left in the pharmacy.
I sent the derm resident
to salvage some crackers from the cafeteria.
Yeah, I know it’s underwater.
He’s from Harvard.
Don’t they have a swimming requirement there?
He’s gotta be good for something.
Stay out of the east stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors.
That’s where we’re stacking the bodies.
There’s ten feet of water flooding the morgue
and fluid filling up the lungs
of the Little Old Lady in heart failure.
She sounds wet.
She may have made it off her roof,
but she’s drowning from the inside.
Water, water, everywhere.
My throat’s dry.
My lips are cracked.
My knuckles hurt.
We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
one by one.
We carried them up eight flights of stairs
to the parking garage roof.
We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
ARDS-man just croaked.
My hands are sore from squeezing that bag.
I kept him alive for four days
and now he’s kicked the bucket on the motherfucking roof
because the helicopters haven’t come.
Little Old Lady’s chest is too stiff to move.
The bag just won’t push it up and down anymore.
She’s toast.
Too much water on the inside,
nothing but water on the outside,
and not even a Diet Coke to drink.
I’m just going to sit down here.
I’m just going to put my head in my hands.
I’m just going to let my shoulders shake.
I’m not crying.
I’m too dry.