Poetry + Spring Forward

Day 33 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Lauren, like several other people, was reading more than one book at a time when I first asked this question, and one of them was This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick, which is poetry. I think this is because she is a poet herself, as well as a visual artist.

We poets read lots of poetry, or we should, anyway. How else are we going to know 1) what's been written and 2) how it's done!

But, like the non-poets out there who also love poetry, I also read it for pleasure, comfort, wisdom, and delight. Poetry, which seems to have few readers during a poet's lifetime, can acquire generations of readers, as soon as we die.

But some poets are very popular during their lifetimes. Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Billy Collins.

I am reading Ballistics by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, because my dad accidentally bought a second copy of it while buying a book about cars. He needs to replace his Avalon...brake issues...probably with another Avalon...overall customer satisfaction. (It'll all work out.) He loves Billy Collins. He just forgot he already had this book, in hardcover.

So I got the paperback, just out this February!

Now, if poetry is so memorable as to become immortal, you might ask how my dad had forgotten that he already had Ballistics...and I will just say 1) my dad is sometimes an impulse buyer and that this sometimes involves gigantic flat-screen televisions and 2) people do this with mysteries all the time, and 3) my mom bought the earlier hardcover of Ballistics. She loves Billy Collins, too. Both my parents appreciate a poet who is clear, often funny, and has something to say.

So do I. I have all his other books, too, including a first edition, first printing hardcover of The Trouble with Poetry, which I found on the sale table ($4) of Border's still in the first year of its publication, which shows you 1) the fate of poetry during a poet's lifetime, even a popular one, and 2) that not even all poets like him, sometimes dismissing him as glib and lightweight because of his humor, but I always find his humor going deeper than glibness, in a book as a whole, and the humor lightening a heavy truth just long enough to carry it into mind or heart, where it lodges like a bullet the surgeons can't remove.

Not like the bullet that passes through the Queen of Hearts on the cover of both the hardcover and softcover Ballistics.

I am also reading Stepping Through Moons, by Toni L. Wilkes, and Looking for Montrose Street, by Carol Frith, two poetry chapbooks from Finishing Line Press. I will return to these in a future blog, I'm sure, because now I am reading them too quickly in voracious delight, as the poets are people I've met through print or electronic correspondence and now want to meet through their poems.

I can already say that the little boy I've met in Toni's poems "The Birthday Party-1952" and "Coming Down" just breaks my heart.

And what delight to see that Carol Frith is exploring formal poetry in Montrose Street. And I have learned that "viburnum" means "wayfaring tree."

A poetry chapbook is a slim book, often, these days, saddle-stapled, and, in the case of Finishing Line Press, tied along the spine with ribbon. The history of chapbooks links them with peddlers as they were light enough to carry in a pack or on his person with other objects for sale. They might be compared in length to chapters of a longer book, or to pamphlets carrying current news, treatises, or ephemeral information. The form survives for poetry, and, for example, with journal reprints or museum exhibit catalogs, where a single article often appears between card covers or stapled wrappers.

This is the last week to order my new chapbook, Living on the Earth, from Finishing Line Press, in its crucial advance sales period, so here's the link to the New Releases page, where you can find it if you want it. I don't think it will ever appear at Borders on the sale table, due to that saddle stapling, but it will eventually turn up at Amazon, where the link will take you back to Finishing Line. Like a little ribbon looped around the spine.

And now it's time to spring forward into your day.... Did you change your clocks?

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.

I Googled myself...

...I Googled myself, which is good to do now and then to find out what anyone might be saying about me (sigh...usually nothing...) and discovered myself to have won an Honorable Mention in the New Women's Voices competition at Finishing Line Press!

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

This is delightful news. The same thing happened to me last year, with the same press! I was a finalist in last year's open chapbook competition, and, since they offer publication to all 10 finalists, I have book coming out this fall, called Broken Sonnets.

You will soon (around July 16) be able to order it at their New Releases page, same link as above, just seach for link at top of page.

The new book is called Living on the Earth, and that publication process will start in a while, and take a while. But I will post links to advance sales, etc.....as soon as I figure out how!