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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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Sun, 20 Jan 2008
Prose on Poetry: Classics and A Formal Feeling Comes
While the main focus of our press is poetry itself, we also try to publish books that expand a reader's thinking about poetry. Our Textos Books imprint brings out one or two books of critical discussion on poetry each year. The latest releases from Textos are especially notable.
The first is Classics, the latest collection of essays by the poet Rachel Hadas. Hadas is a distinguished poet with numerous books to her credit (including The River of Forgetfulness), but she is also a perceptive essayist about poets and poetic craft. Classics is part memoir, as Hadas explores her own background as a classicist and how that informs her poetry, and part critical discussion, as she considers a wide range of poets.
Textos' other major release this year is a reissue of Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes, a landmark anthology of poems in form by contemporary women. First published by Story Line Press in 1994, Finch's anthology laid to rest permanently an old saw that said that strong, feminist poetry could not be written in rhyme and meter. A Formal Feeling Comes went out of print after Story Line Press closed its doors last year, and Textos has taken this opportunity to bring the volume back to a reading public.
Book of the Day: Line Dance by Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker is the rare poet who muse revolves around joy rather than darkness. Even when confronting painful subjects, Crooker's work turns to the light. In Line Dance, her newest collection, Crooker continues this tendency.
Consider this elegy, which is anything but elegiac:
Blues for Karen
God does not leave us comfortless.--Jane Kenyon
The season of your death, morning glories trailed
along the wire fence, one tone deeper than the sky.
I still go to the telephone to call you,
but the lines don't stretch to heaven--
the title of a bad country & western song.
How could you die? We weren't done talking yet.
So I am trying to call you using the morning glories,
whose blue mouths are open to the sky,
whose throats are white stars,
thinking those tendrils could trellis upward,
hand over little green hand, so tenacious,
they hang on in any storm,
forgetting that the quick slap of frost
will put out those blue lights,
that the seasons will snap shut like a purse,
that this old blue world will keep on spinning,
without you.
Crooker's work has an uplifting quality that is rare among contemporary poets. I always find myself nourished when I return to her poems.