Living on the Earth

A fellow blogger here, Julie Kistler, featured my forthcoming poetry chapbook, Living on the Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2010), on her new blog, Follow Spot, which will cover local arts events and more! Here is the link to that:

http://afollowspot.blogspot.com/2010/01/living-on-earth.html

The book is in that crucial advance sales period, when early sales help determine print run and keep publication on schedule. You can order here:

http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

where my current book, Broken Sonnets, is also still available to order easily in this way! That is very nice of Finishing Line to have the 2 books side by side with both International and PayPal ordering buttons!

I am tickled to have 3 "slim volumes of verse," as they say, sort of out there in the world. (The other is Selected Roles, a chapbook of theatre and persona poems based on my years as a professional actor, and it's available at Babbitt's Books.)

http://www.babbittsbooks.com/

I was listening to Piano Jazz on WGLT last night, our local NPR affiliate, about practicing music. People who get really good at what they do are practicing all the time, playing all the time, or, in Michael Jordan's case, playing basketball in the driveway all the time. Some of us are writing all the time, various forms, various ways. I write or revise a poem almost every day for great stretches of time (with some natural interruptions or periods of rest), so this is comforting and encouraging. If I keep doing this--daily, joyful, diligent practice--maybe I will be one of those people!

I am still reading and re-reading The Barbaric Heart by Curtis White. I really like it. The narrative voice in this one is still passionate and funny but not as curmudgeonly as in The Middle Mind. He's just as much a social critic, primarily of the groups of which he is a member, thus practicing what he preaches about self-examination and self-criticism, but there's a stronger sense in this one of compassion, wide and deep.

White gives voice to an impulse I felt way, way back in college (Kenyon College!), reading political philosophy for the first time, to raze everything. Not literally blow anything up, of course, just go back to the start, the heart of it all, the place in mind that allows for clarity of vision, courage, etc. First, see clearly, and then find the path.