Public Poetry

The title of Sleeping with a Famous Poet by Cathleen Calbert suggests comedy, and in its frequent humor, the title (and the book) do not disappoint. But an undercurrent of melancholy runs through this book's light meditations, and unexpectedly tender moments turn up amid the satire and irony.

"Marriage" is a good example of Calbert's technique:

Marriage

Can love conquer time or TV?
Mutability? Matrimony?

Should we divorce
and live in sin? Of course,

I shouldn't even have sex
with a man. We ought to leave

the sword between us that divides
my seventy-nine cents from your dollar,

my glass ceiling from your CEO,
and all the U.S. presidents from my big fat zero.

But I wanted ceremony (you too),
so the old-fashioned blood work

to shelter imaginary children
and the ridiculous visual check

to see if we're stricken with VD
or packing the proper equipment

(you go out, I go in),
then figs in cream and flute-playing,

hitched by my Scientology minister of a sister,
vows carried away on your parents' breeze.

Beginning with rites like these,
our union is doomed, don't you think?

Seriously, can one ever hope
for better than serial monogamy?

Still, we're able to conjure lust
occasionally as affectionate equals

although you rarely do the dishes
(or dust or vacuum), and, I confess,

you're the one I'm rudest to.
Does this sum up something?

What can I say in the twenty-first century?
How dare I try to find the words?

Yet you are my Rockefeller grant, darling,
NEA, Guggenheim, and Whiting.

Ah, love, let us be
happy together, so happy together.

Let me not admit . . . Let me count . . .
Love me two times, baby.

Love me tender.
I am your wife and friend.

This poem runs through several octaves of the emotional scale, and its music is original. Calbert's latest book is a strong one.

There's just a couple of weeks left in WordTech Communications' 2007 reading period. If you want to send us a manuscript to consider, with no reading fee, please see the guidelines.

While we haven't made any final decisions yet, this year's group so far is shaping up to be a strong one. That's very gratifying.

Cynthia Atkins' Psyche's Weathers is a strong collection, with lyric depth and philosophical sophistication. Atkins finds rich metaphors for human experience in the seasons.

Consider the intimate tracings Atkins makes between snowfall and the small details of human life:

Sacred Season

Somewhere at the furthermost tip
of this city, there is music alternating
in the falsetto jowls of wind. Teeth marks
into infinity, all the sawed wood
will be wheeled in for winter.
There is nothing more explicit than this:
a threshold of trees disrobed, a narrative
of light in a window, a paradisal of ice
like hung chandeliers. Transitions
are hardest for us. Detained by weather,
flux of indecision, resistance to change--
We are dug in for the night,
to dip bread in a crock of bouillon,
to age, to dismiss all the things
that enter our lives only peripherally noticed.
The fiery stars replicate
our fingertips, human failing
to let the errant intrusions
slip through them--as now, outside
after an interval of silence, the almost
inaudible sound of someone shoveling
the first snow from their walk.

Brent Terry's Wicked, Excellently is challenging in its humor: Terry's comic linguistic riffs bring a smile to the reader's face, but often rupture conventional meaning, requiring the reader to puzzle through some surface difficult to grasp the deeper meaning beneath.

Sentiment, Not Sentimentality

Go ahead, weep if you want.
Sob. Keen. Howl Spanish curses at French nuns
on a Swedish bus crawling across New Mexico
like a bug. Like a silver centipede on a skateboard
at noon, under a sky obscene in its beneficence.
Mother told me never to trust a sky like that.
Told me my father was a sky like that, and
we all know how that picnic turned out.
Use the word sorghum in a sentence.
Mother would write my name in my underwear "just in case."
It's noon and the landscape is jagged
and endless and red, bits of green scattered here and there
as if someone had disemboweled the earth
and the earth had just eaten a salad.
Because I'm crying on a motorcycle, the earth-
guts look like a DeKooning--abstract,
yet in one corner a hint of a figure presides.
Orange bed. Mountain with coyote. Nuns exclaiming.
Otherwise it's just shapes and squiggly lines playing
connect-the-billboard from here to Denver,
where the nuns visit the Mint and all my former lovers
meet each Tuesday for tea and embarrassing stories.
Embarrassing for me, that is, except
I'm not even there, so why be embarrassed,
and besides, when I'm drunk I recount vividly
how each of their faces contorted while coming.
The little monkey noises.
So, who's embarrassed now?
East of the Rockies, the roadside is littered with Nebraskas.
Iowa's guts are sutured and healing nicely.
Des Moines. DuBuque. Davenport.
What is sorghum and how is it used?
I stop for gas and a candy bar at a station next to a river.
The parking lot's an insurrection of toads.
It's hard not to squish them, hard not to want to.

I am paralyzed before the candy case.
The radio says sorghum prices are down.
Our Grandfathers fought in the war,
so now all roads lead to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The nuns clamber back onto the bus, one
munching a Reese's, mumbling of toads and plagues,
though in French it sounds sort of sexy.
Dieu is a dominatrix with garters
under Her habits, a wooden ruler,
and don't even think about saying no!
There is a highway and there are tears--
a blurred and furzy Panorama. There is a driveway,
a light on and more tears. There's chicken
and Mahler and candles and beer.
My love is in my arms and still there are tears.
She takes off my clothes: inside my underwear
there's someone else's name. Inside my guts
there's a knife, and it feels like the sky.
Sorghum is a grass, cultivated as grain or forage.

Taking the old writing cliche that "sentiment"--feeling--is OK but "sentimentality"--excessive feeling--is not, Terry embarks on a jaunt through the various nuances of this issue. The poem's breakneck pace leaves little room for consideration along the way, but a lot of food for thought at the conclusion.

The gritty narratives of Michele F. Cooper's Posting the Watch--about one woman's experience of farm life--always keep my full attention. Cooper does this partly through her wide range of formal techniques, ranging from brief, even blunt, lyrics to long prose poems.

Sadie Does a Little Jig on the Long Road Home

She is walking down this two-lane,
   see?
And stepping fine along
   those double yellow lines.
Two-stepping, you might call it,
   side-stepping,
doing her little jig,
   trying to get where she's going,
moving 'round, but getting there,
   if you get me.

And she's singing, hear?
   Singing blues--the darkest blue.
You can do that,
   sure,
sing your heart out
   like there's no tomorrow,
not for you, anyway, not when
   you so down in the heels
you can't see your eyelids
   through the salt water-fall.

You can sing 'em high,
   she says,
send those low-down blues
   high as a kite,
high as the clouds up there,
   those big white ice-cream clouds
over the back hills,
   the far hills, back a bit,
not those wispy nothin's
   just overhead.

You see those ice-cream clouds,
   hear those blues,
and sing your eyes out
   till you get those babies
   up where they belong,
carrying your weighed-down baggage--
   all thousand pounds of it--
into a big, bountiful,
   flying aeroplane.

Not a real plane, mind,
   just a head-thought,
getting your sorrows into high gear,
   singing them out,
your big baggage blues,
   singing them
till you're gliding high,
   up where you wanted to be,
wanted to be always,
   always knew it, needed it, wanted to be there all the days--
   night-times, day-times--
night-times, too.

Sure, she wants those
   night-times, too.
Get on off'n this low-down runway
   and out the door.
Real far.
   Real high.
    Real fast.

William Baer's The Ballad Rode into Town is a striking book: a comic narrative written in ballad meter, about the ballad itself, set as a Western. It goes without saying that for such a (pardon the pun) novel narrative approach to work, the formal execution must be flawless: and Baer succeeds in this respect. Consider this poem:

The Ballad Rode Into Town

The ballad rode into town one day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

He wore his blacks, he wore his boots,
he wore a Colt on his hip,
with a re-bored barrel, its trigger filed,
and a custom black-butt grip.

He'd come across the desert heats,
like Dante through his hell,
over the mesas, day and night,
through the sage and the chaparral.

Right up the only street in town,
he and his Morgan came,
as the free-verse rummies scattered,
and slithered away in shame.

But at the saloon, the rondels came out,
with the pretty villanelle,
"Now, that's what I would call a man--
a man with a story to tell."

And even the gambler couplet agreed,
"That's a mighty heroic chap,
who'll face them alone, and fire his Colt,
with the crack of a thunderclap."

They followed him past the Sheriff's door,
abandoned back in June,
then passed the burned-out Weekly Press,
in the silent afternoon.

The ballad rode into town that day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

He rode his Morgan up the street,
and stopped at the only birch,
where all the decent blank-verse folk
were coming out of church.

"Where is she?" he said and waited,
under the Texas skies.
"I'm here!" the lovely sonnet called,
and lit up the rider's eyes.

"They've terrorized this western town,
and bullied us all, my dear.
So set things right and proper,
then take me away from here."

Right then, the critics gang rode up,
a motley crew of thugs,
with .38s and rifles cocked
with lethal dum-dum slugs.

Quickly, the fearful crowd dispersed,
to hide and watch and wait;
the gang boss sneered, "Any last words?"
as he aimed his .38.

But the ballad blew a bullet hole
right through the de-con's eye,
and dropped the freud and marxist crits,
and then the gender guy.

There were, when his chambers were empty,
six dead in the Texas heat;
there were, when he holstered his .45,
six thugs on the dusty street.

And when the celebration peaked,
Miss Sonnet reappeared,
and she and her man rode off to the west,
and even the rummies cheered.

So the ballad rode out of town that day,
still wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

At once satiric and suspenseful, "The Ballad Rode into Town" is an excellent example of Baer's unusual achievement in this book.

Robert McNamara's The Body & the Day is a book best described as teeming. McNamara's close, detailed descriptions of the natural world, briskly rendered in dense free verse, reward the reader's patience.

Dahlias

They arrive on my desk, a clear demonstrative bunch
prickly and blood-red, passion's messengers

even without your note -- three years ago when
dahlias were in bloom -- making the room stand back,

and the little of everything on the mantel, sweet pea
and freesia, larkspur, bristly mourning bride

rooted in a single thickness of glass stones.
The flowers bell like balls in a Galton board, figures

of chance, the rain stopping, sun glancing off
the gilded slope of a pagoda, its reach released in cloud.

And in the garden, a fat bee humming in the trumpet
of a squash flower fumbles with information like a god.

The strong declarative rhythm of these lines--"a fat bee humming in the trumpet/of a squash flower fumbles"--is emblematic of the propulsive energy of McNamara's work.

Richard Moore's collection The Dangerous Corner is elegiac and graceful. Moore is a master of formal poetry, and the poems in The Dangerous Corner are strong in their attention to meter and, at times, rhyme.

Yet Moore has an undeniable gift for contemporary speech within the context of formal meter. "Dry Season" is a compelling example of his craft:

Dry Season

December. The sun is gone.
The water shrinks, like the gums
of an old man. Bank bares--
rocks packed tight--like teeth.
The clouds are turning pink.

I watch them through chain link fence.
They're shut away from me,
distant as a Titian painting.
He saw them first. And the pond,
his also--mellow, ripe.

All that, not mine, taken.
So much! Where are you now?
With your lover in that cute
tearoom where the others
all. . . Our daughter described it.

No, that is not you. . .and I too
grow other. . . I too grasp. . .
at Titian's clouds, till they
--as, watching me, they must--
turn gray, gray now as dust.

The Dangerous Corner is a book to sit down with on a melancholy day, when sad music and contemplation go hand in hand. It is bracing and clarifying.

Emma Saves Her Life by Naton Leslie is a large, engrossing collection of narratives in the voice of the author's grandmother. Leslie really does a terrific job of capturing the nuances of Emma's character, often mixing her actual words with his own plain-spoken verse. Here's a sample:

Emma Adds to Her Story

Two more things. First,
the reason they called
the place where Flossie's
people lived Lost Stocking Ridge
was because one time a peddler
came to Kittanning selling stockings
and other nice things for women.
He made his rounds, then asked
about a short-cut to Dubois
as he was behind schedule.
They sent him up the logging road,
what is now route 29, which goes
up around Hawthorn and Frogtown.

Well, he ran into a bunch of them
moonshiners up on the ridge.
They caught him and killed him,
I said they were bad news,
even worse when they were all
hopped up on hootch. They went
wild and threw his stockings
and such all over the mountainside.
They blew around up there
for weeks, and that's how
they knew the peddler was dead.
And that's why it was called that.

Second, my sister Olivia.
I didn't like her because
she was mean and lazy.
She thought she was prettier
than me and took a man
I was spending time with
just to prove it. She didn't
even like him, but she knew
he was sweet on me. The way
some people will behave.
She could be the very devil,
so I disliked her very much.
That's all I need
to say about that.

In this poem, the storyteller is as important as the story itself: Emma's character, her distinctive voice, shines through here. It's Leslie's own tribute to his inimitable grandmother, and his affection for her voice is contagious.

I greatly enjoyed reading Peter Schmitt's Renewing the Vows because of its quiet, resonant depictions of everyday experience. Schmitt probes memories down to the smallest detail, and they unfold unexpected depths of insight and emotion.

Renewing the Vows

My father, who will be dead in seven months,
and my mother are renewing their vows

in the nineteenth-century New England church
they married in, thirty-eight Octobers back.

The few of our small family are there,
my brother, my father's sister, her friend,

a couple of cousins. My mother, smiling
almost shyly it seems, has yet to take

her eyes off my father, who stands there trembling
a little, partly from the tumor, partly

from emotion which the tumor's location
has only exacerbated these days.

I would like for my father to return
my mother's gaze, but he is staring off

in another direction, his shoulders
perceptibly shaking, past the minister,

past the altar, as if he doesn't have to
look at my mother to know that she is there

and will be there. Even as he speaks his part
his eyes are somewhere else, some far corner,

and he is waiting there until, at last,
her hand reaches his for the final passage

of the ceremony, before the book
closes and there are no more words to repeat.

This poem recalls a poignant event, the renewing of Schmitt's parents' marriage vows, but also darkly foreshadows the death of his father. Fluidly moving through these emotional contrasts, "Renewing the Vows" achieves a distinctive power--as do the other poems in the book.

I took a little break from blogging because the task of updating the WordTech Communications sites--all nine of them--proved to be a herculean task. I pretty worked on nothing but the websites for more than two weeks; this is a once-every-few-years project because of its scope.

The sites don't look much different--they still have the same content, the same font, and a similar layout to before--but, "under the hood," their foundation has been substantially rebuilt. Fortunately, this will make future updates much easier, because they are now much cleaner and more streamlined.

With that done, I'll be getting back to poetry, including blogging about poetry, over the next few days. We have a lot of new books out, and I'm looking forward to discussing them.

I'm in the process of updating the WordTech Communications websites, all seven of them, with a new look and a new structure "under-the-hood," which will make future updates easier.

It's a huge undertaking, because there are several hundred pages there, and also because there's a lot of bad, crufty HTML there that dates back to my earliest days doing web pages, when I knew a lot less than I do now. Before I can even begin to implement the new design, I have to remove vast quantities of junk from the HTML--font settings, extraneous tags that come from exporting HTML from another program such as Microsoft Word--and this is time-consuming.

Many editors wouldn't do this kind of work themselves, but I'm technically inclined--I'm comfortable with writing HTML by hand if necessary. Still, it's time-consuming, and I'm trying to reduce it to as few steps as possible so that it can be done in a couple of weeks instead of several months.

I can't think of a better indicator of how much WordTech has grown than by the size of this project. The number of web pages we have is directly related to the number of books we have in print: each book we publish gets a minimum of two pages, one promoting the book, one featuring sample poetry. (For the past year or so I've also been blogging about each book we publish, trying to offer a personal take on the book rather than PR/jacket copy, so that's an additional writing task.)

What's amazing is that it's still just the two of us, Lori Jareo and myself, plus our large family of authors. Lori handles nearly all of our marketing, production and sales tasks, and I handle the editorial and technical side. And our authors are also partners in our work, by writing outstanding poetry, and helping to organize readings in their communities.

To all of our authors, thank you for your wonderful work. And to their readers, thank you for supporting poetry. We're looking forward to many more years of publishing, and even bigger websites!

Philip Brady is a highly skilled craftsman; his poems sculpt experience into brisk, elegant lines. His topics are varied, but collectively the poems in Fathom offer an invigorating read.

Rhyme

Unseeable, unsayable, being dead.
But shadow-blooming iris, lip blooded--
I see and say. A child, I hummed
and rocked and hummed to dilate time.
Unplumbed, my tongue; but palpable
the pulse of subterranean ventricles
from Queens to Tokyo--turnstiles
ticking by the billions as deep as
Cocytus, where all suns clot.
What's mute, can names dilate?
The salt unseeable, where does it steep?
A key twitches my shadow, trickles blood.
An iris suddenly clots, the blooded word.
Unsayable, all future days unseeable
as unbloomed suns, even tomorrow blind.
My bones steep. Will we wake in time?
Does fear of not returning shadow rhyme?
Unseeable, seeable, rain unsalting seas,
and steeping in my saline blood a key
to Queens or Cocytus. Sayable,
mute death, the day all ventricles
dilate in time. A child, I could pretend
I saw echoes. Time and darkness bend.

"As a child, I could pretend/I saw echoes Time and darkness bend." This couplet, crisp and quick, crystallizes perception in an original and memorable way--like all good music does.

Susan Elbe's Eden in the Rearview Mirror is a dark book, taking a subversive look at the idea of Eden as paradise; there is no paradise, Elbe suggests.

At My Mother's Bedside

Bony hull and sunken wreckage, she sits
propped up by pillows , hands folded
like a splintered bow across her swollen stomach,
her thinned hair, skull cap of dune grass.
I stand next to her, my throat an ocean shell
filled up with sand, with everything
I don' t know how to say. This room, a seine
float, wavery with limit ation. Here, now,
life starts to blur, warps like fish under water.
Outside, voices of my playmates yap joy
in early autumn. I am eight years old, learning
that no matter how much life is left for me,
its exquisite green glass will always be distorted--
death, a dark meniscus of salty water leaching in.

Elbe's work is as far from sentimental as can be imagined. But the result is bracing, like a splash of cold water on a sleepy face.

The fluid poems of Hank Hudepohl's The Journey of Hands are full of surprises. Hudepohl is especially skillful at a sharp turn of perception or phrase, so that the world we thought we knew is suddenly viewed in a different light.

Consider "Burial Grounds":

Burial Grounds

Beyond the gate, headstones: angular
and pale against a backdrop of leafshade,

jutting up out of uneven, mossy ground
in skewed angles, sunlit gray. Pines taller

than oaks border the fence, and inside,
brown needles fleck the graves. Chiseled

on the stones, two names: Clay and Hatfield.
My grandpa walks off to the far end

and looks up into a bewilderment of trees.
"This place has calm," he says,

one hand in his denim jacket, the other resting
on the holster of a gun. He says it almost

to himself, as if he is showing me
where to bury him. I don't answer:

I am studying the faces in the graves.

The poem, like the place it describes, has a sense of calm, but underneath the commonplace surface are faces, hidden, undiscovered.

Julia Lisella's Terrain is a haunting book, part lyric and part narrative, about grieving and loss. The poems are at times oblique, at times blunt, and always engrossing.

Hypothesis

What if it had been you who said
once you'd thought of killing yourself,
that more than once you'd thought
you hated your life but every way to end it
seemed too horrible, for me? What if
it had been you who cried past midnight,
each night holding your belly or your chest
as if your insides would fall out?
And what if it had been you
who held on to the possibility of dying
like a person who holds on to the memory
of an unworthy ex-love?
What if it were me who suggested,
arm's length away, that maybe a drug,
some small pill could keep you sane,
keep you near me, could make you love your life?
What if it were you who'd said
you'd find your own way back?
And once you had done it,
come back so whole, so entirely,
I could not recognize
ever having almost lost you?

Rick Mulkey's Toward Any Darkness is a strong collection of poems; it delves into the darker side of experience that lurks behind a bright surface. Mulkey's work is quiet and unobtrusive, but unfolds its depths in powerful ways.

Late at night when I remember the women
who shaped their lips into a perfect "O"
over the burning end of a joint and blew
shotguns into my mouth until our heads
grew as full of static as the AM station
out of Dubuque and we slid naked and willing
into the backseat, I'm amazed I've ended up
this marginally respectable, 401K contributing,
family man. I'm as likely to be caught
today reading Popular Science on a park bench.
Or if I'm really daring, you might find me browsing Darwin
at Hot Rodz, the local exotic bar, where $4.50 buys you
a watered-down bourbon and a corner table
far enough back not to be bothered or recognized
but close enough, between paragraphs, to watch the dancers.
There are moments when I allow myself these visits
into the smoke and light of my former life
that I hear my name denounced through the megaphone
of what's correct and decent,
and I rush outside to make certain no one
is photographing my car and license plate
for distribution on the Web under the title
"Perverts and Miscreants of the Carolinas."
It isn't that I've forgotten my wife,
or the women before her I spent whole nights with
arguing the rules of love. I wouldn't
exchange a single one of them for any
locker room myth-fest or testosterone prom.
But I won't renounce that world of men either,
leaning against their Mustangs and pickup trucks,
their hoods lifted like battle flags,
groping beers and engines as readily as anything,
sniffing the exiled edge of a wilderness of their own making.
Maybe this is the best that natural selection can do.
Marking trees and tires with our own pee's scent,
barking out lists of boasts, we dream of wading mouth-
deep in the slough of primordial love, not because we're afraid
to hope for something finer, but because we see
those invisible borders drawn on bodies,
places allowed and forbidden, and growing closer
we hear the robotic clamoring of the soul.
So like any good primate we thrust a hand deep
into the stinging ant's hill because what's hidden there
tastes sweet, and the pain, being this much
alive, sweeter still.

The unexpected image of thrusting "a hand deep/into the stinging ant's hill" becomes a striking metaphor for the joy of living. This wry, affectionate poem ends on a deep note of satisfaction for the reader.

In Bird Missing from One Shoulder, Linda Annas Ferguson lovingly recreates the entire world of her childhood, retelling not just family history but family experience. Consider this poem:

Making Biscuits

Mother has never operated
a motor vehicle
or programmed a VCR,
never danced in my father's arms
or listened to the trill of crystal
from the flick of her fingernail.

Each day she rises at five
to the tin music of morning
and the monotony
under the measure
of her breath, her memories
like someone else's life.

She finds comfort
in repetition,
gets lost
in the act of every day.
Her mind wanders
past the window.

Her hands form biscuits,
the dough an ivory cloud
to smooth for her children.
She kneads it with such ease
it barely touches
the heart of her palm.

Ferguson's craft is much like her mother's hands: shaping her lines carefully, effortlessly.

Martha Carlson-Bradley's Season We Can't Resist is striking for the way it blends scientific exactitude with a lyric sense of the world's possibilities. For Bradley, image is music, and her lovingly-crafted free verse poems capture the world's visual nuance in a way that becomes almost aural.

Clear as tea, the river

ferries floating leaves--
birch and alder, ash--

as spangles of October sunlight
burn, blinding:
in shade

one yellow maple leaf
glides vertically

beneath the surface, curved
like a hand at rest--

a gesture not sustainable
in air:
my eyes adjust

and here--here too--

hundreds pass, whole cities
dimmed beneath water,

swift as if some purpose
leads them east.

The world, in its infinite complexity, can withstand any scrutiny we give it--even (or especially) the careful, informed attention of Bradley's knowing eye.

Lee Herrick's This Many Miles from Desire narrates, in a non-linear way, the author's experience as an adopted child and the journey such an experience requires: between cultures, between the past and the present,from uncertainty to rootedness. Herrick's lyrics effectively convey the inner life of such travels.

Adoption Music

I am learning to play the taiko, to feel
how leaves reappear in the trees with such ease.
One monk says this will teach me to hear
the variations of my name:
how my lover sighs it,
how a teacher grinded it out like a curse,
how your mother says it, drowning in a lake
before she leaves you. How it means somewhere
between mothers, not quite the rose
but not quite the roots. Like the woman
who finds you says, Lee, like a discovery--
one more child found in the world's history
of found children. How she said it like the echo
of one plucked e string, a clear pang of delight.

This is a complex poem, striking (literally) a chord in the reader's heart, evoking "the world's history/of found children." Herrick's technique here is simple, fluid, and powerful.

A recent article at the Poetry Foundation website notes, with alarm, the trend toward corporate-style consolidation in literary book distribution. A large distributor, Perseus, has been buying up smaller distributors that specialize in literary publishing, including poetry; its largest acquisition is Consortium, the Cadillac of poetry distributors, which includes such venerable publishers as Copper Canyon Press and Tupelo Press among its clients. Another acquisition was Publishers Group West, which was in bankruptcy.

This kind of corporate acquisition, while not unusual in other industries, is unprecedented in the smaller-scale, frequently non-profit world of poetry publishing. The Poetry Foundation article sums up the concerns of many poetry publishers this way:

Perseus's acquisitions---startlingly aggressive, corporate moves in the mom-and-pop world of poetry presses---have changed the small press landscape, undoing an infrastructure that might have had its weak spots, but was familiar and established. It means the transformation of companies that small presses have worked with for years. Now the small press publisher is asking: who am I sending my books to, and can they be trusted?...When Perseus bought Consortium, the move came as a shock to Consortium's clients, and it had many of them wondering whether or not their hard-earned positions within the distributor's roster might be undermined by the new management.

Apparently Perseus sees commercial potential in small-press distribution, so, despite the uncertainty, it is hard to see how their investments are a bad thing. These purchases mean that distributors such as Consortium are on firmer financial footing; they may be able to grow in ways that they could not under independent ownership. This, in turn, may mean more distribution opportunities and channels for their clients. These distributors haven't exactly been driving huge annual increases in poetry readership, as noted by the Poetry Foundation article: "it's a truism in poetry publishing that most books simply aren't getting out there." Some publishers fear that the consolidation represented by Perseus would lead to fewer, rather than greater, sales: "How can we maintain our visibility when we are becoming an ever-smaller piece of a larger puzzle?" asked Michael Wiegers, the editor of Copper Canyon Press. (For what it's worth, I doubt Copper Canyon has much reason to worry: their 2006 financials, which you can access at their website, show gross revenue of nearly $1.2 million, and a surplus of more than $98,000.)

Of course, the flip side of Wiegers' question is this: Would poetry be better served by distributors such as Publishers Group West going bankrupt, and having their poetry clients just tossed on the street? I doubt it.

The move to bring a more business-like structure to the world of poetry publishing may be unsettling to those publishers who operate as much out of a love of literature as a desire to earn a living. Corporate values--to maximize profit--are not much loved in the world of poetry publishing, where most organizations are incorporated under a not-for-profit basis. Revenue from sales are only a small portion of the budgets of most such organizations; fund-raising, in the form of grants, donations, and so on, are as much a part of the organization's daily work as editorial tasks such as reading manuscripts, proofing page layouts, and designing covers, and as marketing tasks such as sending out news releases and placing advertisements.

Obviously, it remains to be seen whether Perseus' consolidation of small-press distribution will have a beneficial, benign, or harmful effect on literary book sales and readership. I'm hoping that it will be beneficial. However, the issue of bringing poetry to a readership is a vexing one. As the Poetry Foundation article asks:

if the American public will read poetry when they can find it, and if all over the United States warehouses are stacked with books, how, exactly, can we get these books to move? How can we get the poems within them to be seen? Perseus? Anyone?

It's a good question, one without easy answers. Paradoxically, bookstores are a lousy place to sell books--at least, poetry books. When we started WordTech several years ago, we looked at the hurdles we'd have to leap to become a publisher of any size. Under a traditional publishing and distribution model--large press run, warehousing books, and trying to push books into bookstores--it seemed an impossible task. Fortunately, print-on-demand was maturing as an alternative publishing model, and this approach seemed ideally suited for a field such as poetry. (I've discussed the economics of traditional vs. print-on-demand approaches to publishing poetry in a previous blog entry.)

Our approach is one way--one that works for us. I hope that Perseus is able to do a good job for its clients, as well.

I'm very fond of poetry that delves deeply into the connections between human and natural experience--poetry that touches both stones and bones, if you will. Thus, when I first read Shelia Black's book House of Bone in manuscript form, I was intrigued. And her work did not disappoint.

Lyrically rich, brimming with mystery, this poem is a fine example of Black's work:

Playing Dead

Begin by imagining
a failure of will,
the boundaries of the body erased
like lines on a chalkboard.

You might picture the usual things:
night sky, waveless sea,
the greeny depths
which plummet to pure dark

or something as small
as a single square inch
of soil, packed with rotted
leaf, root scrap, cracked

shell, the molted wing
of a specked moth, a handful
of sand, a handful of dust;
it all comes to much the same.

It is the absence of conscious
motion that takes getting used to,
no sound but the slow
settling, the ripening of decay:

burst liquid, gelid light.
The old story of how stars
are born of frozen dust
and radiance

from this house of bone.

Stars, dust, radiance, light: what is more elemental, more fundamental, than this? The dark music and sharp images of Black's work resonate.

Thom Ward's The Matter of the Casket is a collection best described as vigorous: Ward ranges over a wide range of subjects, both dark and light, exploring them with a distinctive sense of brio. These prose poems have many effects on the reader, but boredom is not one of them.

I was happy as Hemingway's bartender. Probably because I didn't know my old man from a seal. Hounded by megaloidophobia, he sequestered himself in our vegetable garden, a place far from big ideas. That's when my mother jammed her green thumb up his ass, metaphorically speaking, I think. Probably because she could and he wouldn't misconstrue it for general relativity or the quadratic equation. Sis continued to smear carrot mush across her face, the high chair's silver mouth, each of us an open system, the biosphere closed. Meanwhile, I dreamt of having a dog that didn't eat or need a walk. Of course, this was years ago, only my perspective, and sometimes it's difficult to see the barrel for the butt end of the gun.

At once dark and comic, "Nuclear Family" is characteristic of Ward's powerful technique in The Matter of the Casket. I don't always know quite how to read prose poetry, but Ward's poems exert an powerful pull on me, page after page.

A is for Anne by Penelope Schott is a powerful imaginging of the life of Anne Hutchinson, who defied the Puritan leadership of Colonial America to proclaim God's word as a dissident. Schott's poetry is equal to her important subject, and memorably depicts Hutchinson's life and times through a collage of voices, images, and narratives.

"My Two Primers" captures a small snippet of Hutchinson's experience, and Schott's technique:

My Two Primers

In the Dame School we have just one,
the Holy Scriptures, but here at home,
I have two books to read: Scripture
and Papa's Trial.
He likes to help me
point by point as I sound out his words.

We see the bishops are very naughty
but Papa is very wise. Sometimes
when he tricks the Bishop, we laugh,
sometimes out loud, or in our hearts.

I like how Papa can be funny, also
I like how he is always right. Christ
likes us smart as well as good.
Yes,
I do try to be good. I'm mostly good
at being smart.

What I admire the most about Jeff Knorr's The Third Body is its quiet, its silences. Knorr is not afaraid to sketch a scene in the sparest of manners, yet his understated fluency opens up great depths of awareness and insight.

Under a Brick Orange Moon

I've never been much good with stars.
But I search tonight
this dark sky pulling itself west.
I look for Orion's belt you showed me years ago,
for the bear, because I call our son Osito,
and hope that across this canyon of night
our eyes might turn in the same direction,
reflect, become a moment of gravitational love.

This field of stars winnows across the sky,
leaps forward under clouds like wild horses.
In an instant I feel you,
a ripple rising from deep, slow water, and we meet
under the low branches of our cherry tree
shifting against this autumn night.

Reading "Under a Brick Orange Moon," I am allowed to simply live in the moment, to experience and revere the night sky as Knorr does. This is what lyric poetry does best, and Knorr is an unusually skillful practicioner of this craft.

I love seeing traditional poetic narratives re-cast in a new light. That's why we eagerly accepted C.J. Sage's Odyssea: in breezy terza rima, it updates the ancient tale of The Odyssey from a female point of view. Sage creates a complete world within this book-length poetic sequence, and it is both entertaining and memorable.

The Song & Dance of Odyssea's Advocate

The women blared the stereo; the bass
blew out the speakers. Into the ear
of Justina, Tilly flirted: "Whose face

is yours, why do you come, from where?
And how? By plane? By ship, then? Surely
you did not swim to Hawaii. Been here

before, have you? And our pearly
shores beckoned you back? Never
have I met someone so burly,

and yet you seem familiar. Clever
as I am, I'm at a loss, I think!"
Tipsy, she wasn't feigning. However

wilting at times, here she'd sink
lower, pressing her head to his shoulder:
"Be a gentleman. Tell me your link

to this neighborhood." Justina would hold her
tongue and tell the cover story:
"My name is Mark. I come from a colder

climate, the northmost state, glorious!--
though without your wide green pastures.
I sailed here on the word of a hoary

fellow captain; he says your mother's
come home. But it seems she's delayed?
No, she wasn't killed . . . . She'd crashed her

ship on some island, betrayed
by the sea and her wit. She couldn't swim,
weak from the wreck--but I think she relays,

now, for home. The gossip is grim:
savages held her captive--wild-haired,
naked savages--they tied her limbs

to trees . . . but don't worry. She's dared
an escape, so much for her family she cares."

Sage's verse is at once colloquial and rhythmic, remaining true to the propulsive force of terza rima without alienating the modern ear. Odyssea is a strong accomplishment of both narrative and verse craft.

John Burt's Victory is a complex book, composed of several long narrative/historical poems about conflict and courage. These poems are not easily read outside of their context, but these lines give a little of the flavor of Burt's method:

I had to write my father one more time,
My last not having opened up the springs
Of his compassion and his bank account.
I’ll bend as low as he can make me bend,
And lower still, if that is what it takes
To help him to persuade himself afresh
That he is not the man he knows he is.
If I pretend to honor his advice
When he pretends to have advice to give
He may forget himself just long enough
To render up just what paternal care
Might owe to filial duty fully done,
And fully done with, soon enough, I hope.

Pecunia non olet, though it be
All raised by taxing pisspots in the stews
Or selling wormy meal and raddled meat
To all my classmates at not quite a bargain
But cheap enough the College has to buy
And dear enough to pay part of his debts,
Except the debt of shame to me, which mounts
With every glance I get across the plate
I too am eating from, the last of all.

Perhaps old Mister Fox gave an advance
To keep our hopes alive about his will,
Or make my father soon forget he saw
That skinny hand just brush my sister’s breast
As if by accident another time
While he was grinning in my father’s face
And she looked far away and kept her peace
Like someone very used to keeping peace.
It’s like enough just at the very last
Old Fox will fox the devil of his soul
By dowering Savannah’s biggest church
With some new fund they’ll have to name for him
For doling Bibles to the Cherokees.
We put out honor like a plate of tarts,
And passed him samples, but he didn’t buy.

And so the steward’s son must beg his Pap
For some one else’s money for a coat,
All blue and buff, and buttoned up with brass
For him to cut a striking figure in
As President of the Euphradian Club
And this year’s Convocation Orator.
And for that hour, not one of them will mark
How rancid vittles bought that coat for me.
But what bought their fine coats? A draft on God?

Burt's poems have the narrative richness of a novella: they have complexity and depth not only in their lines, but in their characterization. It is unusual to read poetry these days that can bear such praise, but Burt's work qualifies.