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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Thu, 01 May 2008
Book of the Day: Easy Marks by Gail White
Here's the most appropriate comment I can make about Easy Marks by Gail White:
Gail White
has bite.
Her poems,
no tomes,
can snap
or slap.
How daft!
I laugh,
but see
just me
entwined
in her lines:
For My Niece as She Enters Her Teens
One thing the Puritans were right about:
Children are savages. They have no mind
or morals, and their art-work doesn't count.
But now, thank God, you leave all that behind
and count as almost human--golden ore
that only wants a little smoothing down.
So now, the news flash you've been waiting for:
Your aunt and uncle didn't come to town
on a load of melons. We discovered sex
without your help; we drove our elders wild
with music, alcohol, and politics,
and wore our hair as long as yours, my child.
So don't suppose you understand pop culture
when you don't even know who Pogo was.
The Beatles aren't yet ready for the mulcher.
I still know several ways to get a buzz,
the Buddhist creed, and how to write free verse.
Your generation, love, could do much worse.
Cold. Nice
as ice.
Book of the Day: The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer
I greatly enjoyed The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer. It is a strong book about the connections between art and the world, about how vision and seeing.
Casebeer's poems are strongest in their images and the surprise they can lead to, as "Matisse Picasso" shows:
Matisse Picasso
Fountains silent in a year
too far gone for the rushing
water of summer pools,
the Paris sky heavy
with drizzle and mist
on our expectant faces.
We wait in a queue
on the steps of the palace
with the others to find
what passed between them.
To find myth revealed
in the line of a rosy nude,
in blue on blue. How easy
to love the graceful curve
of hip or breast. To love
the way works are hung
in pairs, patterns that repeat.
The way they give up
their essence until slats
of shutters become
the metal strings of a guitar.
Here, art transforms, and is transformed in turn, bringing the reader along.
Book of the Day: Country Music by Allen Hoey
Allen Hoey's Country Music contains an unusual amount of life, and I don't mean this as faint praise. Ranging between short lyrics and long, loping narratives, Hoey brings in a multitude of voices and experiences, as well as brief evocations of the natural world.
The title poem gives on instance of the capaciousness of Hoey's work:
Country Music
Mothers and dogs die, and fathers too; in the fullness of time
they all do. Wives and husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, and lovers
run away or break your heart. Someday, someone will smash
your car, your truck, whether it's some dumb-ass in an SUV
or only a deer whose trajectory through life has the misfortune
of intersecting yours a few feet this side of the shoulder--
crumpled fender, bent frame, or just a broken headlight, your baby
ain't the same, and, even apart from the increase you know
your premium will reflect the next time the bill comes due,
it hurts. At some point in your life, unless you're someone
I'd never want to sit next to and sip a beer, you've felt
a little sad and maybe lonely when you've heard a train whistle
keening through the trees on a dark October night. At three o'clock
the wind batters rain against the bedroom window, debris
from the porch roof clatters on the pane, and you lie awake
thinking about how years ago you might have done something
different than the way you did it and rehearsing the many ways
your life might've changed. But would you give up the feeling
you get listening to the slow breath beside you, reassuring,
keeping you in bed when part of you wants to get up, get
the bottle and sit at the kitchen table with only a smudge of light
coming in from the one lamp you've switched on in the living room,
listening to that wind, those twigs and branches racketing
against the glass and clapboard--would you, could you
be any happier, really? A piece of pie, maybe, some stale
remnants of a birthday cake. Instead, you lie in bed, hear
the faint strains of a fiddle, the twang of a Telecaster,
and in the wind the wailing sound of a pedal steel guitar,
all of this put to music--this life you've maybe lived.
Tinged with regret, this poem is nonetheless a celebration of wisdom hard won. Well done.
Book of the Day: Rose Fever by Barbara Daniels
What I admire in Barbara Daniels' Rose Fever is the way she searches out feeling in even the most everyday objects. She writes in a quiet, unadorned style, but her poems have a sly movement from specicity to larger truth.
"What Saves You" is a good example of Daniels' technique:
What Saves You
A bowl of dark oil
stands on your table.
You dip your fingers into it,
cover your whole hand.
You call your feeling sadness.
It is despair. People say
you choose your sorrow,
that truck parked on your chest.
You don't have the strength
to sweep through a store,
buy a stark new lampshade.
huge ovals of purple soap,
white sheets that would bloom
in moonlight. All the utensils
of the heart. You don't paint
a blue sun on your forehead.
Remember prayer?
You squeezed each finger,
gently, eyes tight shut.
It was only an attitude.
But surely it saved you,
didn't it? Didn't it teach you
strangeness? The florid colors
behind closed eyes?
Snow clots the grass outside
your window. If you look
directly into it, can't you
remember the idea of light?
Moving from "a bowl of dark oil" to "the idea of light"--it's a big leap, but Daniels' technique is equal to the task.
Book of the Day: Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven
Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven is a quiet book, balancing a tone of lyric introspection with an unusually wide range of subjects, including China, spirtual concerns, and family history.
Let's look at "Willow":
Willow
All China a green-gold row of them.
When you walk through--
delicate, skirted, light-limbed
and yellow, swishing their loveliness
in the wind--they brush
the whole of you.
The Han are awfully dark
to love such hair: one single tree
the parasol of thousands
of years of poetry.
It is essentially
a pastoral tradition, a light
gesture in a concrete sea--
this park, these willows,
these bamboo growing near,
as if forever curtained
beneath these trees
Li Bai still sprung
pure passion from a flush of wine.
And if you listen
you can almost hear him:
bamboo, bamboo, the green shoots
of earth, heaven when they brush
these yellow skirts!
Looking both inward and outward, Dust and Bread is a book of subtle power.
Book of the Day: Telling Time by the Shadows by J.M. FitzGerald
John FitzGerald's Telling Time by the Shadows is an unusually frank confrontation with God. FitzGerald's poems challenge the emptiness of the universe, questioning how we can intuit God's presence in the shadows:
The Misunderstood
As for the talking,
if I wanted something said,
it would be here.
These lines exist as they do for the falling,
for the unrevealed hurt,
for God to cry and angels fear
at my corruption,
at my shaking,
at my curse.
I need time to get away,
but present demons love me worse,
and figure ways to pose as muses.
They point to where my secrets wither.
They bruise the heights and stir the lows
with longing songs that ever crave to scream:
Let me come back!
No voice is greater than this.
What happened to the blasted silence?
No one should believe I'm real.
I disclaim myself for persona,
or I'd be bawling.
The poem is over,
I used to feel.
But now who knows?
The sense here is one of longing, of agony, even a scream, and of uncertainty. FitzGerald's exploration of these feelings is powerful.
Book of the Day: Organs and Blood by Jean Hollander
Jean Hollander's Organs and Blood is a graceful, dignified lyric collection that explores the various intersections of human and natural experience: the body, history, growth and death. Hollander writes with a subtle and refined music that gradually brings her sharply-etched images into view.
"Despair" is one example of her technique:
Whatever the world really looks like--
is the tender green really grey --
we have eyes to think it beautiful.
The red-breasted bird feeding
its drab young with its own hunger
sees them in its own image
the fireflies dying as they light my bedroom
are dazzling in their promise,
the cat, its tongue rough in the confusion
of love and usage, sits at my hand
waiting for love's hand-out,
and on a cool night, this valley
this clover-covered lawn is paradise
though in your despair you plotted
to crawl out a window to death
but your very darkness kept you
from moving, for in our despair
we are helpless, the blind dog follows
its broken trail, the little frogs leap
into chlorinated water, they cannot help it,
though I fish them out over and over
the guileless moths wasting themselves
against the lights that save us:
cooking fires and lighthouses,
the simple flame of a candle--
ceremony and knowledge--
a radiance of night.
Emotion comes alive in these stately lines.
Book of the Day: Cloud Journal by David Rigsbee
We don't publish a lot of book-length poetic sequences: they are difficult to write successfully. Often in reading them, we find strong poems mixed with weaker poems, or a wandering focus. That's why David Rigsbee's Cloud Journal is such a nice collection.
Two long sonnet sequences comprise the book, and they are as different as can be. The first, "Sonnets to Hamlet," is a compelling narrative about the tragedy of a fire in the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina that killed twenty-five people. The second, "Cloud Journal" is an extended lyric exploration of place and perception. Rigsbee writes a quiet, fluid poem that allows his subject matter to radiate through.
Here's an example of Rigsbee's work, from "Sonnets to Hamlet":
Dragonfly September, birdsong is boilerplate.
The stir of heat, like a clothesline’s wave
keeps horizons indistinct: you suffocate.
An indigenous butterfly leaves the grave
to flit in children’s connect-the-dots down
cemetery lanes to haloed fields.
Time that is everything lies in the unseen;
a flick of its toad’s tongue yields
only one more spire-skewered prize.
Nearby the last cougar parts the weeds
leveling real estate with the same enterprise
that measures its life-dream in overloads,
where predator’s eye and victim’s throat
hold silence in place as you would a coat.
In its quiet detail, this poem sets the stage well for the horrific story it will later tell.
Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Changes at Amazon
Amazon is currently the largest online retailer for books, and we have made Amazon the major component of our strategy for selling individual copies of our books online: every book we publish has a link to Amazon.
Until now.
Amazon has recently made some distressing moves against print-on-demand (POD) publishers, which is the kind of printing my organization uses. Here's a brief summary:
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In 2005, Amazon purchased a print-on-demand printer/publisher, Booksurge. Booksurge is a competitor to the largest POD printer, Lightning Source (whom we use to print our books).
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Over the past few weeks, Amazon has been contacting some print-on-demand publishers and demanding that they begin using Booksurge for POD books sold through Amazon.
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If the publisher does not sign up with Booksurge, Amazon has threatened to remove that publisher’s books from direct sale on Amazon. The books would still be listed on Amazon, but could only be purchased from third-party booksellers who have listings in Amazon’s Marketplace network.
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Amazon has justified this move on the basis of improved customer service and faster shipping of titles.
We're concerned with this development. Based on these facts, here is how we will be responding to the situation:
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We have used Booksurge in the past, but were not happy with the quality of their printed products or their customer service. That is why we switched to Lightning Source. We plan to stay with Lightning Source and have no plans to add Booksurge as a printer. We do not want to compromise on the quality of the printed books we sell.
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Our books will continue to be available through Amazon, either for direct sale or from third-parties (if they enforce their ultimatum about using Booksurge or else).
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We have posted additional sales links on our websites for individuals to order the books we sell--specifically, to Barnes and Noble and Powells.
We think it's important to offer our readers multiple outlets to purchase our titles, so that the decisions of a single vendor don't affect customer choice.
For more information on Amazon's actions, this site offers a useful overview of information and the industry's response.
Tue, 18 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Smoke and Strong Whiskey by Robin Chapman
The poems in Robin Chapman's Smoke and Strong Whiskey are inward in their focus; whether narrative or lyrics about landscapes, they prompt a meditative attention from the reader.
"Shadows" is characteristic of the interiority of these poems:
Shadows
And who is it, standing
In the shadows, waiting these weeks
To speak to me,
And each time she motioned
I turned away?
For I had sharpened a knife
And cut my heart free
Of the man we loved
Who could not be in our life--
Mumbled into the phone Goodbye
And now I feared
That she stood with a knife
In her own childlike hand
Meant for the wild grief
Closing her throat.
I was afraid
I’d done her an injury
I could not mend--left her alone,
Dying of hunger and need.
Or was that me?
And the woman in the dark,
The one whose anger
Had sharpened the blade?
And there’s more to say than this,
For I dreamed I walked,
A woman grown, down a lonely path
And came upon
Two dark and curly-headed girls--
One sad, one sullen--
And held out to each my arms.
Went on with toddlers
Slung on each hip.
Dark, dreamlike, "Shadows" is haunting in its quiet intensity.
Book of the Day: Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree by Edward Dougherty
Edward Dougherty's Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree is a quiet, graceful collection of lyrics and narratives about the author's time in Japan. Reflecting the understated aesthetic so prevalent in Asian poetry, Dougherty's poems are mostly small exursions into revelation.
This poem is characteristic:
Origami
Folded by an old woman, silver bird
what do you know? Your paper feathers
are slippery. You give the light back.
At the flash she dropped like a rag.
A single day, a single bird: the day
that repeats itself with each crease.
The hours stretch out like crows' wings.
Samuel said he wanted to come here
to help people forget the past. My eyes burn
with the day's unrelenting length.
My life is brief and my sight short.
No wonder she keeps turning paper
in her creased but unburned hand.
While each poem might work on a modest scale, cululatively Dougherty's work expands the reader's awareness of human connection, history, and the world.
Mon, 03 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Sort of Gone by Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh's Sort of Gone is a dynamic narrative about men pursuing their dreams of playing professional baseball. Using varying techniques and voices, Freligh presents a rich portrait of these players' hardscrabble lives.
A good example is "The Wages of Sin in Western New York":
The Wages of Sin in Western New York
Fourth of July a tornado crashes
parties, backyard picnics, tosses ten
houses a dozen miles north, plants them
in a farmer's field. A warning
God's running out of patience,
says the parish priest, prompting
a parade of people to drive out after mass
to witness just what He has wrought.
Al finds a pair of sneakers that exactly
fit his feet, a catcher's mitt, nearly new,
a birthday card signed Marge and Greg,
a baby doll without its head. Wonders
what Marge did, or Greg, to piss off God,
make Him stir the air with His index finger,
twist the wind so it blew their lives
to kingdom come. What could He
do now to Al, his family, snug in their Chevy,
a blue bead in the rosary of cars strung
bumper to bumper in both directions,
do to them when they bend
to say grace over Sunday dinner?
Suppose there's a heavenly blackboard
somewhere bearing their names, a blizzard
of chalk marks tallied by angels
waiting to give the high sign to Him
that they've run out of chances, time
for a natural disaster to show who's boss.
Afterward would some small boy sift
through the rubble, think about
the wages of sin? Or would he test
the leather of a catcher's mitt, think
finder's keepers, loser's weepers?
No romantic illusions here, the quest of these players still has its own kind of grace.
Fri, 22 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Second Opinion by Leatha Kendrick
Beneath the colloquial surface of Leatha Kendrick's Second Opinion is a life-and-death struggle: a battle against cancer. The quiet tone of Kendrick's poems reflects a determination to find what is worth living for, to find brightness in even the darkest days: the underlying gravity makes the poems' appreciation of the daily rhythms of life that much more poignant.
Consider this poem:
Christmas, Adolescence, Yin and Yang
My first love called them Skeeter and Bite.
Equal, then, if small. Skeeter got most
of his attention. Now that right
breast's shadowed, a dark harbor
to what will not differentiate, but does
its incessant adolescent dance. Light
and unseen shadow. Eye of light in darkness,
eye of darkness in light--two nipples
staring from one divided chest. They'll lift
one out, the eye sewn shut by mastectomy.
At this festive time of year, God's breast
sees all, bears all. His eyes never
shut. Mary suckled Jesus, and
in some theologies, the milk
of human kindness flows
from His chest. At any rate,
that yearning to reach down and lift
someone to the heart does not depend
on breasts (I'm grateful to the man
who told me this, his eyes dark with grief.)
And yet, I lie abed touching the soft weight
splayed from breastbone to underarm and wonder
how we'd treat these dugs, these tits, if God Herself
floated forever and ever Amen in Heaven above
with lovely, heavy, downward-reaching breasts.
Mixing humor and spiritual yearning, this poem encompasses many of the strengths of Kendrick's wonderful collection.
Fri, 15 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Ancestral Radio by Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Edward Haworth Hoeppner's Ancestral Radio traces unusual connections between experience and our perception of that experience. Hoeppner covers a wide range of subjects, usually in an ambling free-verse line that takes its time to ponder, to meditate.
Here's one good example:
Poem without Hands
The idealist's question would be
something like: What right have I not
to doubt the existence of my hands?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
It would like stepping onto glass, unbroken sheets
to oval per instruction as a pony takes shape
in matchbook covers that would teach you how to draw.
But the mazed, concentric hoops of blunt desire
you've penciled, like so much bangle on your wrists,
resist the sudden transformation: no living animals
move from off these lines, their poor mathematics.
Without touch, far better the ivory slippers you have found
sleepwalking on water, slipping out beneath your robe
until you've reached the stairs and wake. A ship
inside a bottle, you stretch your arms against the walls
going down into the dark. You know the paintings hung
on the landing you can't see, but none of them are yours.
And what you must not do: reach out as you step down,
brush along the wooden frames and close your eyes,
stop here, put your too smooth fingers to your lips.
A poem without hands, a world without touch--an impoverished world, indeed. Hoeppner explores these ironies with wit and compassion.
Tue, 12 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: The Night Marsh by Penny Harter
Penny Harter's The Night Marsh is a book of discoveries. Harter's poems closely inspect the surface of the world, and delve beneath that surface as well, and the result is always a surprise.
Consider this poem:
Archaeology
She is always unearthing something--
here, a rotting bone a dog buried,
there, a headless doll with
stuffing leaking from its chest.
She digs in this field each night,
sniffing the dirt, savoring the strata
as she claws her way down
through soil and clay.
Perhaps the grinning skulls
of her cursed father, mother,
will turn up, blind as bulbs
waiting to sprout into her palms.
She carries resurrection in her hands,
her fingers splayed to sift the earth,
searching for some fragment of a skull
that answers to her name.
There is almost a physical, tactile sense of searching in this poem. Not only is "Archeaology" a compelling poem of seeking, it is characteristic of Harter's method.