Fairfax, sail away in peace--

Mid-ocean, thought lost, and talking ardently to the planet Venus: so much to astonish! What a creature is man... Go here.

The news of poetry--

I just sent off my response to Makoto Fujimura's request for a poem honoring the 100th anniversary of Japan's gift of cherry trees for the Tidal Basin in Washington, D. C.  Good commissions are inspiring, and so I wrote a poem in six parts, mingling modes and including dryad and kodama, grafting and planting, journeys and deep-growing, war and peaceful ease.

Thanks to Dale Favier for taking a look beforehand--very helpful to have a California Buddhist read one's cross-cultural poem! I am enjoying his poetry book, Opening the World, which you may inspect at the Pindrop Press site.
Update:
Dear Mole,
Mea culpa! 
Oregon! Oregon! Oregon! 
Yrs,
Ratty

Fascinating or terribly depressing or both, sales for poetry books are so slim compared to fiction that one can figure out exactly what is happening a good deal of the time. For example, according to Bookscan (which counts a large number of reporting bookstores but not all), I have just sold seven copies of The Throne of Psyche in New York and in unnameable rural places--part of that's obvious, as The Anesthesia Book Club in Fly Creek has invited me to visit their group in March--and one in Albuquerque, New Mexico. If I knew somebody in Albuquerque, I might have a chance of guessing who had bought that copy! Lesson: be sure and buy yourself a copy and be counted? Get seven copies and be of staggering importance? Nab eight and rule the world? XD!

My friend Yolanda Sharpe and I put our heads together and submitted to the collaborative journal, Yew, and so now will have three poems entwined with three paintings there some time soon. Fun!

Interview by a college senior

MARLY YOUMANS,

Interview by Benjamin Francis Miller

16 February 2012

When did you first know you wanted to write for a living?

My mother says she knew I would be a writer when I was in second grade. I don’t remember ever wanting to be much else, though I was also a professor for a while and enjoyed looking at poetry and fiction with my students.

What kind of writing do you usually do? Academic, business, literature etc.?

Novels – I tend to not do the same thing twice, so my novels are quite varied.

Short stories – Most of these I do as a response to requests from anthologists.

Poetry – formal poems of various sorts—lyric, monologue, narrative. One epic!

How long have you been writing?

I was a passionate reader before I was a passionate writer, but words have always been a vocation for me. As a child, reading was my vocation and far ahead of school in importance. I read under my desk, in the tub, in the bed by flashlight…

Has any of your work been published?

Little Jordan – novella – David R. Godine, Publisher, 1995

Catherwood – novel – Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996

The Wolf Pit – novel – Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001 The Michael Shaara Award

Claire – poetry – Louisiana State University Press, 2003

The Curse of the Raven Mocker – Southern fantasy novel for children, FSG, 2003

Ingledove – Southern fantasy novel for young adults, FSG, 2005

Val/Orson – novel – UK: P. S. Publishing, 2009

The Throne of Psyche – poetry – Mercer University Press, 2011

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage – novel – Mercer University Press,

March 2012  The Ferrol Sams Award in Fiction

Forthcoming—

Thaliad – epic poem – Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal

The Foliate Head – poetry – UK: Stanza Press

Maze of Blood – novel – Mercer University Press

Glimmerglass – novel – Mercer University Press

And I have oodles of poetry and fiction in magazines and anthologies…

You can find out more about me at my blog/website, http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.

What are some of your stronger points as a writer?

My manuscripts are said to be very “clean” and so not much trouble for an editor.

I never have writer’s block and am productive.

I have joy in spilling words on the page.

I also have been lucky enough to collaborate in special projects with some important visual artists like Makoto Fujimura and Clive Hicks-Jenkins and currently am collaborating with composer Paul Digby and painter Lynn Diby in one project and on others with English painter Graham Ward and Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales.

How long does it usually take to complete your work?

I am quite fast with a rough draft. However, I would add that length of time is meaningless. The muse’s gifts are unfair—some take forever to do what others accomplish with careless ease.

What are some of the things which get in your way when writing?

House drudgery. Mountains of laundry. Children’s needs. Bills. Taxes. Appointments. Volunteering. The person from Porlock. Life! But life and people always come first—without life, there is no writing, no love, no sap in paper veins, no source material.

Do you have any quirks or problems you find in your writing which annoy you?

I wish to be tidier in my writing room!

When writing about places you haven't been, how much work do you put into researching them? What are some of your tactics while researching?

I never over-research places, particularly places in the past. You should be careful not to burden your prose with research—the same amount of the world should be visible as if you were writing about your own sphere.

What one needs seems to magically appear when you’re working on a book—things that would pass unnoticed normally are all lit up and shiny with importance. When I wrote The Wolf Pit, I managed to please historians of the Civil War by using only primary materials—therefore it was impossible for me to do what, say, Kaye Gibbons did in her Civil War book and have people jaunting around on railroads when the tracks had already been destroyed.

What have been some of the most significant influences on your writing?

A deep, passionate engagement with books and poetry while a child and teen is essential to the writer I am. Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Yeats, Keats, Anglo-Saxon, the Bronte sisters, the Gawain poet, Herbert, Marvell, Donne, Fielding, Austen, Stevens, Blake, Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Faulkner, etc. in English, plus much modern and contemporary writing and work in translation.

What was your most challenging written work? Why?

Novels are all a challenge, each in its own way, because with a novel one is always beginning again with no clear path through an invisible labyrinth. And novels are long.

As for poetry, I once typed my then-long hair around the patten of a typewriter—so retrieving my hair after drafting a poem called “Snow House Stories” was a bit arduous… 

My main difficulty with poetry was coming to the understanding that I was bored with free verse and simple lyric and needed muscular, demanding form and an infusion of story and voices. I was too influenced by other writers around me for a long time, and I threw away most of my poetry. Writing fiction showed me what I desired in many ways, and it also taught me that I wanted poetry to be as unlike fiction as it could be.

Do you have any insight for young aspiring authors?

Read books old and new. Buy books. Scribble in the margins! Soak up the word. Spend time with great masters of the word, not feeble or trendy writers. The company you keep in books will mark you, so be careful what company you choose.

Write a manifesto for yourself now and then!

Don’t let anyone pronounce your fate for good or ill as a young writer.

If you have the requisite tools and skills, dive in and practice the art. Nobody can say what the vagaries of life—the intense grief and joy of youth, the losses that come to all—and the exercise of the heart and mind and soul will do to you by the age of 30. They may just make a writer of you.

On the other hand, don’t set your longings on some outside validation because “success” is often fool’s gold and a fool’s goal and can break your precious heart. Write because you love words and stories or aspire to the song-like heights of poetry.  Write because moving words on the page is a thrill and a kick and makes you glad.

Art: on being asked

WONDERING

This morning I wrote a five-part sequence of poems in answer to a request for a poem on a very particular subject (also from this morning) from Makoto Fujimura for The Curator, a magazine of International Arts Movement. And I'm thinking about the power of asking--the power of a commission, whether paid or unpaid. Right now my friend Clive is going hammer-and-tongs in answer to a request to illustrate Stravinsky's The Soldiers Tale for a live performance, and you can page through the vigorous, bold results at his Artlog. He just finished fountaining-up images for my upcoming book, The Foliate Head. Why are requests so inspiring? I never use "prompts," although they appear to be quite popular if one can judge by the web. (I don't have anything against them; it just smacks of school and assignments to me, and I refused to let either have much to do with poems.) But a request is definitely a kind of effective prompt--a grand sort of prompt.

Is it because most art types (not musicians and singers, not dancers) are by necessity so solitary in our work, and in our dour, crazy moments fabulate that we are abysmally alone in the writing room or studio and nobody cares about our work (not that such an idea should matter a whit) or bothers to purchase and peruse it and so on? So that a sign of affection from the outside world has the ability to make one toss the "to do" list (however interesting, however pressing) straight over one's shoulder? I don't really think that's the answer... Not sure what is! Newness? Sparking a thought? Whimsical and rather irresponsible behavior? Whatever it is, I like it. Probably that's partly why I like The Lydian Stones. It's fun to ask.

Update: Clive's answer in the comments is more solid than my rather frivolous post!

* * *

WONDERING SOME MORE

While I was looking at The Curator--or maybe at the IAM site--I stumbled across a link to the most common five regrets of those in hospice or palliative care, as collected by a nurse. And I'm thinking about what my regrets would be, were I to tumble down the basement stairs (always a danger, as the dog bolts into me fairly frequently, and she is big, and I am not especially so) and land on my noggin this afternoon. If you feel like telling me yours, I might well tell you mine... if I figure them out. Still meditating the question. Update: Beth Adams responds.

AND A THIRD THING

Why is this post so very parenthetical in mode? Tell me that.

Folded poems

A cheerful display of the books from www.origamipoems.com

One likeable thing about the web is the way it gives rise to new forms--my pen-friend Corey Mesler has just been published in an origami book, and you may have a copy at the price of a sheet of paper and a little ink. Here is the book, with a cover by Corey's teenage daughter Chloe. And here you may follow visual and verbal instructions on how to fold your sheet of paper, making a single cut and ending up with a small workable book. Afterward, you may read about the industrious and much-published author and bookstore owner here. A complete index of poets and places where the origami books are displayed is also available.

Nester chooses Blake on "The Lydian Stones"

Valentine's Day pub date!
Victorian Violet Press

Illustrations by Nina Canal of France

Today is pub date for Robbi Nester's chapbook from Karen Kelsay Davies' Victorian Violet Press, and Robbi is the featured chooser on The Lydian Stones.  Please drop by and leave her a congratulatory valentine. Enjoy!

And here is a cruel winter Valentine for you if you have had enough of candy hearts and small animals dressed in ruffly pink.

Final design for "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage"

Click to see it in full glory! Available as a pre-order now.

More author comments... and camellias

Camellia courtesy of sxc.hu and Melodi T.
of Waiuku, Auckland, New Zealand.

In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.  The book reads as if Youmans took the best parts of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, The Reivers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and crafted from them a tale both magical and fine. Her rich language and lovely turns of phrase invite the reader to linger. Ironically, there is at the same time a subtle pressure throughout the novel to turn the page, because Youmans has achieved that rarest of all accomplishments: she has created a flawed hero about which we care. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is one of the best books I have read.  --Raymond L. Atkins

Perhaps I should say that I have not read two of those books. Memory says that I picked up On the Road but laid it down, never to go beyond the start. And I have not read The Curious Incident, probably because I was born into a neurologically odd family and have had the fantods over other people's neurological issues quite often enough. However, I have read the other three, two of them once, one of them many times.


To read comments by Lucius Shepard and Ron Rash and read further, go here.


The camellia that hangs like a cloud over the head of the wanderer on the cover was taken by Mary Beth Kosowski near the Mercer University Press office. For any Mercerians passing by, the flower was spotted in front of Woodruff House on Coleman Hill, next to the Mercer law school.

Forthcoming Books

One of the many foliate heads painted by Clive Hicks-Jenkins...
Choosing a cover will be hard!

For various reasons--the global economy and far-off pub dates that hampered me from arranging North American reprints--I have made a number of changes in my publishing schedule, both the when and the who.  

POETRY
The Foliate Head - Stanza Press (UK)
Thaliad - Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal, CA)

NOVELS
Glimmerglass - Mercer University Press
Maze of Blood - Mercer University Press

REPRINT
Catherwood - Mercer University Press

Birthday card for Mr. Dickens--

In celebration of Charles Dickens and his 200th birthday--and I am very thankful that he was born, and have been so since I was very quite young--here's a poem.  As he is rather intangible these days, at least to my earthly sight, I wish to give him something likewise intangible. And he already has today's Google Doodle... so I think a poem in order.

This poem originally appeared in Electric Velocipede and is reprinted in my 2011 poetry book, The Throne of Psyche, and it's a tad strange. It may have originally been inspired by the Great Planetary Weight Gain, or about a trifle of old fogeyish distaste for some other changes, less fleshly! Dickens had a good many distastes for the ills of his world, which he turned into wonderful backdrops and catalysts for stories of comedy and drama, so it seems right enough: happy birthday, Charles Dickens.

(And if you click on the little envelope below the post, you may send a Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens card to a friend who likes Dickens or poetry or both!)


WHEN DEMONS RULED


This world became impossibly complex.
The people fattened but were small as toys
Inside--lazy and sour, as though a hex

Had taken hold. A woman's outer poise
Disguised an inner cowering of nerve,
And often sons remained forever boys.

I watched my daughters flower, only to swerve
Toward superstition, lies, and games of chance--
In other days our kind had vied to serve.

The demon brood condemned me for a glance.
A devil locked me in their fortressed towers,
But when they saw me try to sing and dance,

Tower changed to thimble, and life to hours,
Song to shriek in the Ministry of Powers.


Now you get an academic star if you recognize the elements combined to make the form of the poem. I will supply a ladder, but you will have to climb up and rescue the star from the Star Academy yourself.







I suppose this may be why Dickens is such a marvelous depicter of both shallow-but-lively and round characters:  he said:

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."

Precarious beauties

Over the years I have been friends with many visual artists and often found that what they said had a curious resonance for me--that it meant more about my own work in words that one might have assumed, and sometimes more than what other writers had to say.  I like what Andy Goldsworthy writes in Time (Henry N. Abrams, 2000) about moving along the edge of collapse, about beauty balanced above the ice:

The beauty of the red is its connection to life--underwritten by fragility, pain, and violence--words that I would have to use in describing beauty itself. This sense of life draws me to nature, but with it also comes an equally strong sense of death. I cannot walk far before seeing something dead and decaying. Uprooted trees, fallen rocks, landslides, flood damage... A grip on beauty is necessary for me to feel and make sense of its underlying precariousness. So many of my sculptures are within a hair's breadth of failure. I often see works--a balanced column of rocks, stacked icicles--looking stronger with each piece that is added, but also know that each addition takes it closer to the edge of collapse. Some of my most memorable works have been made in this way, and some of my worst failures could have produced some great pieces. Beauty does not avoid difficulty but hovers dangerously above it--like walking on thin ice.

Art magic & "Requiem"

"Angel in the Graveyard," courtesy of sxc.hu and Lesley Mackin
of Bournemouth, Dorset, UK.

One of the strange aspects to art is how it draws all things to its net--or so it feels to the maker.  All large works seem to have some sort of magnetic power to draw what is needed, but I suppose it is just simply that the world is full of many things, and when turning to a new pursuit, some suddenly stand out as if lit from below.  As I work on the text to Requiem, the collaborative piece to be done with composer Paul Digby and painter Lynn Digby, the world seems to offer the particular jog I need--a photograph of 11th century graves cut in stone and gilded by the sun, a certain poem by Cavafy, the frost on the windowpane... Too, this long sequence with its traditional structure reaches out to embrace the closing of two lives in the past two months--a suicide, a death from cancer--two events that meant so much not just to me but to the entire community where I now live. Small as a fleck or word or as large as a generous life:  each thing leaps into place. Perhaps it is as close to magic as I can come through words.

CHOIR

Yolanda Sharpe, Pear and Apple, 2007
pen and ink, colored pencil and acrylic painted paper, 15 by 15 by 15 inches

Some time ago I agreed to join a choir, my arm having been twisted into strange configurations by an otherwise quite gentle and pleasant choirmistress. I had friends in the choir—my painter friend Yolanda Sharpe, who has appeared on this blog and The Lydian Stones, and who has a marvelous voice and does recitals, and many others. But right away I discovered that a choir is such a mixture of many parts--apples and oranges and pears and pomellos jumbled together.  We have such an unusual number of pronounced eccentrics (a conventionally polite word for lunatics) in our choir that I have threatened to write a revelatory comic novel called CHOIR.  Each member must be made to blend into a whole: into a kind of family, if you will.

I didn’t particularly want to plunge into the choir, as participation demanded a lesson once a week, practices twice a week, and performance once and occasionally twice a week. Then there are unexpected things called choir festivals and sundry other stray performances. That’s a lot to add onto the heaped plate of a mother of three who has many village activities and also just happens to be an obsessed writer. I did not know how to read music, though I was perfectly capable of bumping along if given the first note. Luckily I was a soprano, which struck me as far easier than being in any of the other sections.

Since then I have discovered something that lots of people know who are not obsessed artists of some sort, bound to a vocation.  I have found out that it is a pleasure to add some focus and discipline to one’s natural feeling for an art that one is no expert in. Likewise, it is enjoyable to learn something new; at the moment, I am grasping intervals and doing much better with duration of notes and rests.  These things remind me of poetry, and I certainly aspire to song there.

Each of the arts is a fertile sea in which strange, beautiful beings may be found—some immensely great, others quite invisible to the naked eye. Without the sea of culture and its innumerable small creatures, no great one could survive. 

Leaves of the Head

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has moved on from the eight final images for the cover of The Foliate Head, though you may still vote  on your favorite one (or two) if you like.  Now he has bent his own leafy mind to interior green men, or "green men in black and white."

And we have now been given absolute freedom in almost every way to frolic with the book design. Pete Crowther, publisher of Stanza Press (UK), has given us his blessing to do whatever we like save change the dimensions of the book! So this means much pleasure for author, artist, and designer...

Andrew Wakelin designed the two books in Clive's honor which came out at the time of the retrospective show last year, and they are both beautiful--the gorgeous art book from Lund Humphries that accompanied the exhibition, Clive Hicks-Jenkins; and The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins from Gray Mare and Carolina Wren. Andrew will also be in charge here. Andrew, Clive, and I are the conspirators who will have our say, and that will be great fun.

Sharpe chooses Gautier

Yolanda Sharpe, Neighborhood, encaustic
and mixed media on double panels,
48 by 43.75 by 4 inches, 2010

YOLANDA SHARPE, AGAIN,
this time on THE LYDIAN STONES

Yolanda Sharpe is the chooser this week on The Lydian Stones. Please fly off there and leave a comment... Yolanda is a remarkable person who is a painter and longtime head of the SUNY-Oneonta art department. She is also a notable soprano and writes poetry to boot. I somehow could not hold her to one poem...

UNDERSTANDING POETRY, AGAIN

Once upon a time I had a mustard-colored copy of Understanding Poetry. Maybe you did, too, way back when. Garrick Davis has interesting things to say about the book and its authors, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.

(And long ago I had a class on Faulkner with Brooks... He was elderly but in possession of quite sound marbles. Our first assignment was to do a timeline for the somewhat wayward Soldier's Pay. I did a maniacal, detailed version--and learned a lot as a writer about keeping time in line and how easily it can go astray.)

Clips:

This was the official call for literature teachers across to the country to drop the scholarly pretensions of their profession, and return to literature. Though it seems a modest opening paragraph for a letter now, it was heard at the time as a rallying cry by the young, and a declaration of war by the old.  John Crowe Ransom, in a review of the book, said as much: “The analyses are as much of the old poems as the new ones, and those of the old are as fresh and illuminating as those of the new; or at least, nearly. What can this mean but that criticism as it is now practiced is a new thing?”


and

To open its pages now and compare it to our new textbooks is to suffer vertigo—our educational system has fallen from a very high place. (What would the authors have made of colleges that don’t require English Literature majors, even, to take a course in Shakespeare?) What they never set down was a reason why college undergraduates should study poetry at all. In our own, more dissolute, day—when the humanities have fallen into disrepute—we have need of such reasons. We have need of teachers like Brooks and Warren again, who would explain to us why freshman should always be forced to climb the summits of literature together. If you think that textbooks are invariably dull affairs, you owe it to yourself to find this book.

VILLANELLE, AGAIN

Update: Poet Maryann Corbett wrote me that the link wasn't working for her. For some reason it takes a minute to come up. I tried linking to other pages with the same result. Just wait, and it will come up instead of just giving an about: blank message.

If you are interested in formal poetry: I am dipping into Amanda French's online dissertation, Refrain Again: The Return of the Villanelle. And I am finding it enlightening.  Thank you, Amanda! Here's a snip:

It is in fact the case that the vast majority of poetry scholars know only as much about the villanelle as is to be found in handbooks such as Adams’s Poetic Designs–and the handbooks are all wrong.

Handbooks and anthologies and scholarly surveys–reference texts of any kind–that mention the villanelle almost unanimously assert or strongly imply that the villanelle has nineteen lines and an alternating refrain on the scheme A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”, and that this scheme was fixed centuries ago in France through then-common practice, though it is now a rarity. Here is a sobering truth: only a single poet of the Renaissance wrote a villanelle by that definition, and he wrote only one. Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle,” also called “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle” (probably written in 1574), has come to represent a nonexistent tradition of which it is the sole example.

Clive takes a poll: The Foliate Head

 

Interested in how the numbers are falling? If you want to see how people have liked the images that Clive Hicks-Jenkins has made for The Foliate Head, fly here. Feel free to lodge an opinion! Comments off here--please comment there to keep things easy...

Clive grows leafy!

Green men can be dangerous. Once they open their mouths and the leaves erupt, watch out!

While sketching and painting and fooling with green man images for the cover of my upcoming book of poetry, The Foliate Head,  the painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins was overcome by the green spirit and cannot stop tossing off magical images... He appears to be inhabited by greenishness and can't stop.

He has gotten many interesting comments at the Artlog (as I have, too, here and on facebook and via email--thanks to those of you who sounded off!), and if you want to join in and give an opinion of the cover images, they are now in two spots. Six finalists were collected here: http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/marlys-book-cover/. A further cover image went up today: http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/green-men/, and he has started posting interior images. If you look at those two posts, you may refer to an image by the number under each.

If you commented somewhere before, feel free to comment again now that we have more... And if you have not commented, feel free to join in!

Plethora!

UPDATE: ADDED LINK TO FINALISTS AND  LINKS TO SOME OF THE POEMS.
Slide down two posts and take a look at the links to the now-five posts of work by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. We'll be deciding on a cover image right away, so feel free to lodge an opinion!

Curmudgeon genius--

Do not miss! Sendak and Colbert part one and part two. Let the wild rumpus start!


Update: brilliant little video sent to me on facebook by the inimitable Gary Dietz: The Joy of Books.  "After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I (Sean Ohlenkamp) decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto."


Also, I'm still having a bit of difficulty with the next post on "The Lydian Stones," so it will probably go up tomorrow rather than today. It's more complicated than most.

Clive and the foliate head!

FINAL UPDATE (I think!):  Clive has gathered together the cover finalists.
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/marlys-book-cover/
"marly's book and henry's window"

* * *

Note for people interested in how the pictures go with the text:

John Coulthart (who definitely ought to have a cover opinion!) mentioned not knowing the text as an issue. If anybody wants a peek / preview, the easiest way is to go to “Mezzo Cammin,” where I have evidently published more poems than any other contributor (because I like the publication and the editor.)

Here are some links to some poems in the book from that site:

http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2009&iss=1&cat=poetry&page=youmans This one includes the poem called “The Foliate Head.” The second poem is also in the book.

http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2008&iss=1&cat=poetry&page=youmans The first, second, and fifth poems are in the book and, I think, all in the foliate portion. The second poem is dedicated to Clive because he once played Puck (of course!) It won’t be listed that way in the book because the book itself is dedicated to him. (This is a very Clivean project, so I think it the right one to have his name on the dedication page…)

http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2009&iss=1&cat=poetry&page=youmans All of these are in the book, though not in the foliate section. But they are quite harmonious with the greener poems.

UPDATE:  A new link has been added to the list! See below.
MORE UPDATERY:  A fifth link! Got an opinion? Voice it!

Want to see the cover work in progress for The Foliate Head, my poetry book coming out from Stanza Press (UK)? Clive Hicks-Jenkins is working on the cover, and you may look at preliminary drawings here and here. Let me know what you like best!

"marly youmans and the foliate head"
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/
A wealth of initial ideas.

"marly youmans and the foliate head: part 2"
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/
More leafy green man heads, including a tattooed head!

"marly youmans and the foliate head: part 3"
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/
Color...

"marly and the foliate head: part 4"
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/marly-and-the-foliate-head-part-4/
Tattoo!

"marly and the foliate head: part 5:
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/marly-and-the-foliate-head-part-5/
Three new heads, in color: Clive says he will repost tomorrow, as these were taken with electric light and have a bit of reflection and perhaps inaccuracy of color. But I think you can see them pretty well!

I had a great time rummaging through books on green men while I was staying in Wales, so this feels like a coming-full-circle moment. Clive is doing cover and division pages, and Andrew Wakelin is grand ruler of design. No doubt Peter Wakelin will be unable to restrain himself from an opinion or two as well. Fun! I just wish I could sit down with them all in person once again, under the shadow of the hedge by Ty Isaf...

The Lydian Stones: Sharpe chooses Gautier

There will be a slight delay on The Lydian Stones for today--I just realized that I have an incomplete translation and need to catch the author of this week's piece before I post... It is by painter and singer Yolanda Sharpe, who was head of the art department at SUNY-Oneonta for twelve years (what a saint!) Watch this space for a link...

Goldsworthy Redux

I woke up to brighter light—new snow—and thought about Andy Goldsworthy. I’m still wondering if those three stacked stones in the edge of the lake were his, a sort of private conversation with Otsego Lake and Kingfisher Tower, back when he was doing a project near Albany…  Perhaps it was simply homage to him, he being so near at the time.  He’s such an oddly Old Testament sort of figure, setting up cairns and stacked stone markers where he has had an encounter with the otherworldly this-worldly.  I am very glad he does it, though I am also glad that I make my cairns out of words.

My idea of Andy Goldsworthy is very appealing, the thought that he gets up early and works in the cold (being a Southerner, I do not want to go and do likewise!) in order to search for some kind of “rightness” and to make something that appears effortless.  It is a right goal of all art, to labor in order to create what seems tossed-off, effortless, or as natural as a leaf spiring from the darkness of earth.

Another thing I like about Goldsworthy is that he is not afraid to be silly and play, and that for him the whole world becomes the realm of art. For him, the landscape is always on the verge of revelation—it reveals itself in speaking water, stone, air, and fire. (Fire often appears when ice or particles or fur catch light, but it can also appear in transformed vegetable matter, as when a disk of earth-blackened leaves inside a sort of tequila sunrise of yellow-orange-red leaves shows that energy burned in a place as a bonfire does in a ring of stones.)

A great wheel of upbuilding and raveling never stops, and at its dark center one verges onto another world. It’s rather like the biblical injunction to “pray without ceasing”—that is, to make one’s entire life lit with the radiance of knowing God, knowing a greater life and being more alive. Art is always calling us to a larger life, to other worlds…

A large part of Andy Goldsworthy's art is to make one see this world with infant sight. That means that when, say, a great cairn of bleached driftwood (black-hearted, topped by a disk of darkness and absence) unwinds and floats apart as the sea comes in, we will see it drawn away as if into another plane, another reality—the work being a sort of nest of time raveled and invaded by eternity, a new sort of making rather than simple unmaking. The marriage of the dark center with the earthly driftwood limbs is seemingly dissolved yet encompasses more as it disintegrates, widening to hold the sea and vanishing as if into another realm—the sea accepts its gift.

So incense went up from sacrifice, sending up a wavering ladder of fragrance between one world and another.  Likewise Goldsworthy’s great upright circles of polar ice blocks or stone work work rather in the way pierced stone was said to allow fairy sight, transforming the eye and showing a new world, there all the time but unseen.   

Farmer chooses Reece

The weekly post is up at The Lydian Stones! Jonathan Farmer, mover and shaker of things literary in the Triangle area of North Carolina, chooses Spencer Reece.

What would happen? Quote of the Day.

Courtesy of sxc.hu and Christopher Glase
of Aberdeen, Maryland, US.

Discussing the state of civilization over a leisurely breakfast--particularly children, pregnant women, and the elderly on the Costa Concordia, cracks on the People of Walmart website, the latest romance from the Occupy movement--a teen and a level 3 sex offender--sweet redemption no doubt found...

"What would happen if a Walmart tipped over and sank?"  --M. T. M.

Waving not drowning

I've been busy with distant 12-hour wrestling meets and a near-disaster with freezing pipes, but will be around tomorrow with a new The Lydian Stones post! Also, for any Virginians who did not already see this on facebook--I'll be speaking to MALIA in Roanoke on April 20th. Open to the public. More on that later.

9 poems in "Mezzo Cammin"

Nine bites from the nine poems up at the brand new issue of Mezzo Cammin, edited by poet Kim Bridgford: lots of good company, too!  The last poem is an excerpt from Thaliad, forthcoming from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. The eight preceded are from the manuscript, The Book of the Red King. I'll be sending that one out by the end of the year.

The Desire for the Red King 

Certain people live among our kind,
So strange they might be gold or cinnabar,
So different from us in turn of mind.


"My Poor Fool Is Hanged"

Who knows why the pages strung him up?
For nine hours he was hung at tower-top,
Roped by a foot, one leg crossing the other,


Scholastic Interlude

The college came and begged the Fool to teach;
They gave him bags of silver and a wand
For rapping on the desks of boys and girls. 


All Hallowed Angels Say

A rondel of the Fool

All hallowed angels say, not sing
Their messages and starry praise
Because the aura of bright haze


The Fool's Confession

When the Fool confesses to the Priest,
The world reels on its axis, and a gust
Of blackened leaves and feathers tears the field


The Peacock's Tail

Three days of snow. The blackened world turns white.
The garden urns hoist up their wedding cakes.
An iron table lifts the crystal coffin where


The Fool Tells Children a Story at the Solstice

Once was a particle of dust
Named Hob; and one day a big gust

Of wind whooshed him into the air,


The Red King's Word

When your stepmother shoves you out the door
Barefoot, in a gauzy smock and cobweb cape,
Do not repine. Cry not! Draw from your heart


from Thaliad

I. Luring the Starlit Muse

Year 67 After the Fire
Emma declares what she knows about the time before the fire 
and calls on a starlit muse, the only love she will ever have, 
to tell the hero's saga of The House of Thalia and Thorn.

It was the age beyond the ragged time
When all that matters grew disorderly--
When artworks changed, expressive, narcissist,

Another award for Howard Bahr

Howard Bahr has received the Mississippi Governor's Award for Literary Excellence! And that makes me glad--Howard is one of those writers who quietly works in solitude and semi-obscurity, devoted to the beauty and power of the muse.


He is also one of the most charming correspondents in the whole great multi-verse, and he still writes on paper! A letter in the mail from Howard makes the day brighter, more adventurous. I am lucky in my pen pals, but Howard is almost unique among them in his aversion to email--my stash of letters is a visible reminder of his artfulness and heart.


Howard may strike you as a writer cut from bolder cloth than most.  He was a gunner's mate during the Vietnam war, and he was a brakeman and yard clerk in the South and West.  That doesn't mean that he doesn't have graduate degrees; he does, and he teaches at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. He is also the former curator of Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home.  Howard is the author of The Black Flower (Nautical & Aviation Press, 1997), The Year of Jubilo (Henry Holt, 2000), The Judas Field (Henry Holt, 2006), and Pelican Road (MacAdam/Cage, 2008).  He also has a children's book, Home for Christmas, also from Nautical and Aviation.

Howard suffered a setback when MacAdam/Cage toppled shortly after his last book was published, but the company has a bit of the phoenix somewhere in the bones, and is struggling up from its own ashes.  Pelican Road is still available for purchase, and so if you don't have a copy, please consider buying one from a legitimate source. (Readers need to remember that when you buy the book of a "mid-list" writer, you cast a vote in his or her favor that matters and is counted--and upon which the publication of the next book may depend. People often think that our "votes don't matter" in the political realm, but in publishing they matter a great deal.  In a publishing world where marketing departments have the most power, sufficient "votes" make a great difference.)


I'm glad to say that A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is dedicated to Howard, and it offers a quote from Pelican Road on the dedication page. It's good to give thanks for those who stand against the meretricious and the trendy and stand for the shapeliness and beauty of a made thing.  The Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts are only given to those who have made significant contributions to our culture through their work. Like Howard Bahr.

Hicks-Jenkins chooses Youmans on The Lydian Stones

The Lydian Stones went on a short hiatus for much of the holidays, and I am pleased to say that I have actually received letters of reproach! In apology, I post the next offering a day early. Clive Hicks-Jenkins was the first off the mark with a post, but I have delayed him because it seemed flaunting and immodest to have the first post be about one of my own poems.

One of those days

Detail,Yolanda Sharpe painting, Earlville Opera House Show.

I am reading A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for the very last time--it's about to go to the printer. And I am having one of those awful days where absurd things happen, and everything goes wrong. The most recent thing is that I just broke the glass in a biggish watercolor by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.  Glass all over the dining room that I will have to pick up without accidentally slicing off my head, which is where I am supposed to keep my brain, though today I am not sure where it is. Honestly. I'm going out with a painter friend, Yolanda. Shall have to be careful not to be run over by an elephant escaped from a traveling circus or be stung by a knot of winter bees or eat a poisonous fish. Because it's one of those sorts of days.