Well, it's getting near midnight and it appears the Alchemist's Arcanabulum is open for business.

I've been recently getting back into poetry and have been doing a lot of formalist work, which is a fancy way of saying stuff that has rhyme and meter.

The world of formal poetry is...how should I put it? Both weird and terribly familiar. Weird in that there's a huge amount of prestige. Everyone's one or two degrees of separation from presidents, governors and other luminaries who occasionally open checkbooks (for tiny amounts, but hey, it's the honor of the thing, right?) It's terribly familiar in that it's like science fiction fandom. The prestigious little journals, quarterlies and new poetry websites are edited by a relatively small circle of people who know each other, and with rare exceptions, pay something like a couple copies. In the SF field we call those "fanzines."

A few days ago I went to my editor, Debbie Notkin's, New Year's Day open house. She remarked that the budgets in the poetry field made science fiction look lavish. I have to agree.

Of course, writing is done because you have to, and if my muse says it's poetry today, then it's poetry.

The other fannish thing that I've found about poetry circles is that like SF, there are groups who actually critique stuff. The one I'm mainly hanging out at right now is Eratosphere, specifically in the Deep End forum. Learning a lot there.

On that end, one thing that I think will be a regular feature here is the "Word of the Day." Not one of those artificial things where I go out of my way to find a funky word, dandle it in front of everyone and say, "Wow, aren't I cool? I know what this means and you don't." Heck, I'm an author, and part of my business is knowing obscure words.

No, what's more fun is admitting my own ignorance and reporting the words I just encounted. The poetry field is a great vocabulary builder, so here's the word for the day:

Bassarid

I encountered this in a poem by Terese Coe, then finally found the definition listed in "A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology" by Michael Stapleton:

Bassarids: Another name given to the votaries of Dionysus. Scholars give the meaning as "wearers of fox skins."

Think of a bunch of blood-drinking drunk Grecian matrons wearing fox-fur stoles (imagine Zsa-Zsa going postal) and you've got the general idea. Also known as the Maenads, the Bacchante, the Bacchi and so on.

No numbers for the day, but hey, this is a new blog.