Small Town Girl Makes Good

This past week my local newspaper, The Progress, ran an article about my new book. Nothing huge. It's not the New York Times, but it was nice. The neighbors still don't seem to know me or that a poet lives up the street. No one hailed me at the pizzeria Friday night. But a waitress at the diner where my husband gets breakfast told him she'd seen my "advertisement." Advertisement? I've got a dentist appointment this Friday. Maybe Dr. J. will ask for my autograph.

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Countdown to Publication: Counting No More

Yesterday's sidebar counter said, "It is finally here!" Not quite, but I was nervously awaiting a box of 20 advance copies. My publisher had rush ordered them so that I would have copies for this weekend's Caffe Lena Poetry Festival.

The publication schedule got a bit behind as a devilish margin error had crept in—a tedious, laborious fix, but it had to be done. All in all, I proofed the galleys five times. That was more than with the first two books, but when one error is fixed, sometimes another pops up, so with each new set of galleys, I really needed to carefully read the entire book all over again. I'm glad I did. I spotted an occasional orphan and some faulty indents that resulted from the margin repair. I spotted a word mysteriously missing from a title. In galleys #4 the margins were still messed up. Then they were fixed and all other errors also fixed.

This morning at 9:30 the doorbell rang. As I opened the door, I saw the UPS truck pulling away. There on the porch was this lovely sight.

I brought the box into the kitchen and carefully sliced open the top.

Oh, let them be lovely!

And they are! I hope I'm allowed to say that about my own book, but I could not be happier with the design of this book. I've been through the interior and so far have not spotted any goofs. Since these advance copies were rushed to me, the book isn't yet available, but will be soon. In the meantime, I've got some to take to the festival.

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Countdown to Publication: My Cover Unveiled

Ta Da! Drum roll, please. I'm pulling the veil off the cover of my soon-to-be-released book. I hope you love it as much as I do. Story behind the cover will follow soon. For now just the cover. Look, but don't touch!

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Poet du Jour: Alex Grant

I'm sure I would praise this collection even if it hadn't been published by my own publisher, Wind Publications. But I'm glad that it was published by my publisher as I'm enormously proud to share shelf space with this poet. This is a sophisticated collection, all the more impressively so when we consider that this is Grant's first full-length collection. Perhaps, though, the level of sophistication and the beauty of Fear of Moving Water should come as no surprise as Grant is well-published and has had two award-winning chapbooks as well as numerous other awards.

The collection consists of 39 poems divided into four sections, each preceded by a prose poem which serves as a prologue. There's not an ounce of fat in the collection, not one poem that I wish had been removed, not one space where something seems to be missing. This quality of tightness is also found in the poems.

There is much to admire here. First, there's an appealing range of subject matter. Clearly, Grant is attracted to the animal world. We find the poems populated with turtles, beavers, a mouse, an old dog, a cuckoo. Even the small ugly things of this earth merit his attention—the cockroach, the garden midge, the spider. Grant is also drawn to other forms of art. There are poems based on photos and paintings as well as poems about artists such as Van Gogh, actress Lillian Gish, haiku master Issa. The collection is subtly sprinkled with literary allusions to such people as Neruda, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Several poems reveal a fondness for the culinary arts, for example, "Hamish Samey's Turnip Soup."

Then there's the pure poetry of these poems. Here's a poet who luxuriates in language, who has a talent for the odd word, the just-right word, and an ear for the music of the words. Listen to the lovely ell-sounds in "Black Moon": ". . . the dry doggerel / of mackerel scales and filament // of a season ended, to the water. / The sand flays the last flakes / of paint from the boat's hull . . ." Note, too, the a-sounds. Here's another example of Grant's diction and musicality, this one from "Fuel": "We spend the morning burning / oleander brush. Shards of sunlight / slash the canopy, cleave pathways // through pungent smoke-shrouds, // fuel clumps of emerald sphagnum."

Grant's mastery of craft is also seen in his use of imagery and figurative language. Note the sensory appeal in this triple simile from "Neruda's Suicide Note": ". . . you cover / your face with your hand, / and it sticks to your skin / like confetti, like phosphorus / launched from a Greek warship, / like the skin of a plum / peeled by a broken nail." While most of the poems are, like this one, written in free verse, there is a formal elegance to them. And Grant makes a nod to formalism in the collection's five sonnets, a villanelle, and a solo renga.

Here are two poems from the collection which represent it nicely and which should whet your appetite for the entire collection.

INTERPRETING THE SILENCE

'Behind every jewel stand three hundred sweating horses'
—Zen Buddhist aphorism
Believers in invisibility, we describe the sound
that nothing makes. At night, we hear the stars
move across the sky, listen to the moon-vine

grow, wait for the engines of the sun to crack
the morning. The clacking wheels of desire
lead us to this - this endless fascination, this

capturing of fog in a bottle. We need to inhale
it, to learn its given name, to feel it compress
under the skin and emerge through the pores,

an invisible diamond inside a painted nutshell,
held tight in the breath of our hands. We pry
the shell apart, clamp the empty geodes to our

ears, like seashore children straining to hear
the wedding of the oceans in a paper cup,
and listen to the sound that nothing makes.
And here's one that's as frightening as it is lovely.

THREAD

In the beginning, they were insignificant—like black
spider mites, or immature fruit flies. We were blind
to their subtle swelling, their shifting shapes

and colors, suddenly lurid green, slick and shiny
as obscene bottles. The years turned like a mill wheel,
and we retreated deeper into the belly of the house,

and few could recall a time when the steady hum
of their wings didn't thicken the air. One of us will
sometimes foray into their part of the house—always,

the reports are worse than the time before—they have
become cannibals: they devise new methods of torture:
their young subsist on the bodies of spiders.

And they grow—always—stronger, more ruthless,
We have lived so long in this part of the house,
where no light penetrates, that our young have begun

to be born blind—sightless, parchment skin stretched
over useless orbs, like unfinished paintings. Some
who remember when we lived outside of the house,

in the trees, in the fields and hedgerows, say that
our time will come again. They say that one day,
we will look up at the moon again, from high

in the wet branches of Sycamore trees,
and see the earth, so far below, and swing,
once again, on lengths of radiant silk.

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Who Wears Short Shorts?

Short short poems, that is. I have to admit that I've been leery of them for years. There doesn't seem to be enough to grab my interest, not enough there to leave me pondering, not enough to call me back for repeated readings. I've never been able to muster up much interest in haiku which usually strike me as little exercises. (21st-century apology inserted here to all haiku lovers and poets.)

I heard Kay Ryan refer to her own poems as "snack poems." That's how I felt about really short poems, i.e., a snack but not a meal.

Then I found that from time to time I came across a short poem that knocked my socks off. I started collecting them like shells. Some of them called to me late at night.

I found myself trying my hand at a few shorties. I distrusted them and put them away. Too short to get a major role in a journal.

Then several months ago I was asked to submit some work to a nice online journal. I noticed that the poems in that journal tended to be short, so I dug out some of my little ones and sent them off. Two grabbed right up! I submitted a few of my formal ones to another journal. Two more snatched up. Had I been unfair to my own poems?

Then Kay Ryan was appointed Poet Laureate. Snacks can be very satisfying. Snacks can stimulate the appetite. Snacks can stave off hunger.

Before I ruin my appetite with any more of these metaphors, I want to offer you two short poems by Lola Haskins, both of them perfect gems, I think, and both from her book Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems.
Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.Speaking of metaphors!

Here's another short one by Haskins:
Love and Cancer

Think small, the way ants
build their hills, a grain
at a time. If I could be
one cell in you, how ardently
I'd multiply. Until I was a hundred,
a million cells. Until I filled
so much of your X-rayed self
that if they cut me out,
you could not survive.

You'll never catch me in wearing short shorts, but you will find me with a revised opinion of short poems. And you will definitely catch me recommending Haskins' excellent collection to you. There you will find poems long and short and some in-between. There you will find many poems that satisfy and enrich you.

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My Cup Runneth Over

That is, my mug runneth over. Today Garrison Keillor is featuring another of my poems from What Feeds Us. I'm feeling enormously lucky, grateful, and happy. And thank you so much to all the amazing people out there who took the time to listen to and read Thursday's poem and then write me a nice note. I really appreciate it!

Today Keillor is featuring Blueberry, one of several food-related poems in the collection. I am so pleased that Keillor chose this poem as it's one I often use when giving workshops. It works with poets of all ages. The poem and the prompt will also appear in a new textbook coming out soon from Autumn House Press.

I began the poem several years ago during a week at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center in Massachusetts. Having time and space to myself for an entire week, I wanted to get as much writing done as possible. Sometimes, though, it takes more than time and space.

One evening I found myself facing the blank sheet with a head just as empty. So I thought about the fruit salad I'd had for lunch that day, especially the plump blueberries. I then began a free-writing about the blueberry, largely just descriptive—size, shape, color, and so on. Not surprisingly, I was not overly thrilled with what I produced. I put the writing away in my folder—I never throw out any of my writing.

Sure enough, when I looked through that folder several months later, I saw potential in the draft that I hadn't seen before. And I remembered my mother's fondness for blueberry pancakes, so I added on something about that. Then I thought I wanted to know more about the blueberry, so I did a Google search and uncovered some interesting pieces of information, e.g, that the blueberry is the state fruit of New Jersey—I live in NJ and didn't know that. I also learned that the little blueberry is great for fighting urinary tract infections and is rich in antioxidants. I imported some of that information and diction into the poem. I began to think of the blueberry metaphorically, and that's when the poem took off.

Time, patience, persistence. Then maybe a poem gets hatched.