Bright story, new year

The year past was a long and complicated journey, a tempering one--an interesting Bilbo sort of journey, where one grows older and means not to come back. And somehow I feel unready for New Year's resolutions. Perhaps I will make mine around St. Valentine's day, when it used to be said that the birds would fly back to summer homes... By that date, I start to believe that spring will come to the North.

Here is a story like a wish in exchange for resolutions.

One day some years ago, the poet (and rancher, elsewhere) Drum Hadley invited the five of us to walk around the lake and pools and waterfalls he had designed for his mother's property above Otsego Lake. We wandered around, picking up leaves and improving the time, as Thoreau would say. The scene was a pleasant mix of nature and artifice, with rustic lampposts sheathed in bark set up around the edge of the lake.

When my daughter fell behind on the path (how long ago was it? was she thirteen or thereabouts?) I turned to look back. Her hand was stretched out in a formal gesture, the palm and fingers not quite touching the bole of the lamppost. Out of memory, she glances at me, her eyes shining--or is it her face, or her whole body in the faint first shimmer from the lamp?

Narnia, she says.

In the eye of the beholder

Thanks, Alisa Alering. It's always interesting to find out what appeals to a young writer who has been digging around in one's word-hoard, and how one appears--what the strengths are, according to another mind. And I always wanted to be silver-tongued and maybe a bit strange around the edges! Nicely deckled, shall we say...

Huswifery

"My conversation make to be thy Reele..."
           --Edward Taylor

Sent my husband to the wrestling tournament in Cobleskill and spent the day in "huswifery" and the occasional shoveling of snow--four more loads of laundry and I shall put my feet up and be devil-may-care for the evening. Took a whirl by facebook and noticed people arguing that blogs are no longer the "done" thing, so what are you doing here? And now I whirl off to the Laundry Doom Room. If you have a question or a subject you'd like to see a post on, here at the end of things--past the Mayan calendar, past solstice, past Christmas and on the way to Epiphany--leave word in the comments.

Higher

Here are a few Robert Duncan quotes, plucked from an Angle Mlinko article on poet Robert Duncan and good for the third day of Christmas. Capes and hats and amber necklaces...

I love the way Duncan raises his vocation to the highest levels. He aims at the stars; he aims at God.

As portrayed in Mlinko's description, Duncan the fluent and ecstatic lecturer reminds me of descriptions of Emerson the lecturer. For the whole article, click here.

***

Duncan rejecting "workshopping": “We will be detectives not judges…. Week by week we will study . . . vowels, consonants, the structure of rime.”

Duncan on the stakes of art: “Poetry is not my stock in trade, it is my life.”

How high are those stakes? Duncan takes them higher: “In language I encounter God.”

Duncan on the poet's transformation: “To become a poet, means to be aware of creation….”

Duncan mid-lecture: "I write poetry for the fucking stars!"

Duncan on language: “Vowels the spirit, Consonants the body.”

Duncan on confessional poetry: “I loathe these personal problems that have no deep root but are all social currency—case history of a social worker. Wld. as soon attend divorce court.”

The state of poetry, 25 years on--

I went back and reread Joseph Epstein's "Who Killed Poetry?" I wondered if it might have discouraged me from Thaliad if I had remember it better back in 2010 when I wrote the poem. I think not, as I do exactly what I want to do in the kingdom of words. (My luck: I have no merit raise to gain, no academic promotion to seek, no faux-muse to follow.) But it should have done so, no doubt, with its talk of the impossibility of the long poem in our day, and the silliness and rarification and professionalization of poets! Nevertheless, he says this:

But in taking up the lyric as its chief form, contemporary poetry has seriously delimited itself. It thereby gives away much that has always made literature an activity of primary significance; it gives away the power to tell stories, to report on how people live and have lived, to struggle for those larger truths about life the discovery of which is the final justification for reading. Thus has poetry in our day become, in the words of the intelligent young poet and critic Brad Leithauser, "a sadly peripheral art form."

He does make me glad that I abandoned teaching after five years in the trenches, and that I live a very ordinary life with a household full of children. But. He certainly showed little hope for poetry or the long poem 25 years ago: "...just now the entire enterprise of poetic creation seems threatened by having been taken out of the world, chilled in the classroom, and vastly overproduced by men and women who are licensed to write it by degree if not necessarily by talent or spirit." Would he find us in a better state now? Or would he count the increasing number of MFA programs (low residency programs abound) and laugh?

Box of gratitudes no. 2: the designers

End-of-the-year thanks:

• To the design team of Burt and Burt (new parents Mary-Frances Glover Burt and Jim Burt) for the immaculate design on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press - The Ferrol Sams Award), which had such high production values that for the first time a just-published book of mine passed muster with my librarian mother (that means she thought it better made than books I've done with houses like Farrar, Straus & Giroux and David R. Godine;
• To the generous Andrew Wakelin for working with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (and sometimes me) on the design for The Foliate Head and creating an exceptional book. All the design work was done outside of normal Stanza Press (UK) staff; while we had to rely on the base template for the poetry series, The Foliate Head is very much its own self. Thank you, Andrew, for giving your time, and to Pete Crowther for giving us that freedom.
• To publisher Elizabeth Adams of Phoenicia Publishing (a small press based in Montreal), who did a marvelous job of balancing Hicks-Jenkins artwork with a long-poem text in sections for Thaliad. The decisions regarding placement of text, titles, or image on the page are thought-out and well-judged. An accomplished artist, writer, and designer, Beth wears a great many hats well in her work for Phoenicia. Thank you, Ms. Wonderful Hatter! All three books this year were exceptional in production.
• And while we're on the subject of design and books that took up my time this year, what a wonderful choice of artist in Alexander Jansson for William Alexander's Goblin Secrets, winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. I enjoyed being on the judging panel and think we found a lovely book in all ways.

Merry Christmas-to-come! Today's posts below: one on rhyme; one Box of Gratitudes; and one recommending weaver Susan Leveille of the famous Morgan family of North Carolina, transformers of mountain crafts and culture, and her Oaks Gallery.

Susan Morgan Leveille and Oaks Gallery

If you would like a gift certificate or gift promise here on Christmas Eve, I'm recommending Susan Morgan Leveille's Oaks Gallery in Dillsboro, North Carolina. If not, I'm suggesting the gallery and Susan as a future source of gifts.

The Morgan family is responsible for much of the revival of western North Carolina crafts in the early twentieth century. Lucy Morgan, Susan's aunt, was the founder of the Penland School. Her parents were the founders of Dillsboro's Riverwood studios. The Oaks Gallery has suffered from the recession and from the loss of a train line into Dillsboro. A few of their items are on display at the website... Please keep them in mind if you are wandering in western North Carolina.

Susan is a superlative weaver and teacher of weaving, a great person to commission. She is in demand for shawls and scarves, and you can't find a better at overshot coverlet weaving--a thing that often seems a lost art. She has taught at Penland (where she started weaving at the age of seven) and the John C. Campbell Folk School, is a lifetime member and former president of The Southern Highland Craft Guild, and is a co-founder of Stecoah Valley Weavers.

The Morgan family transformed crafts in the mountains of North Carolina. Susan is a flower on that illustrious branch. I recommend her work and gallery.

Box of gratitudes no. 1: art kindred

Here we are on Christmas Eve Day--a good time to say thanks. I'm starting with a few of my art kindred.

• To Yolanda Sharpe (artist and singer based in Oneonta but frequently in Cooperstown), and Ashley Cooper (artist and classicist around the corner) for going on their own wondrous paths with resolution, and for being part of my everyday life in the arts.
• To Clive Hicks-Jenkins, for the deep pleasure of collaboration across the Atlantic, especially this year for his marvelous work in making beautiful The Foliate Head and Thaliad.
• To novelists Peg Leon and Alice Lichtenstein and sometimes Ginnah Howard for the Occasional Lunch Club Frolic that reminds me that I'm not alone as a novelist in the wilds between the upper Adirondacks and the Catskills. (Let's have lunch!)
• To Paul Digby for doing exactly what he wants in the realm of composing (and various other arts and crafts that catch his fancy), and for the fact that making videos for my poems is one of the things he wants.
• To Mary Boxley Bullington (Mary, bad thing! Update that blog...) for making a painting inspired by The Book of the Red King, for introducing me to the work of potter Steve Mitchell, and for visits in Roanoke. (If you want to see more of her work, visit facebook.)

Exactly so--

As I spent most of the afternoon singing passages of The Messiah, and most of the evening taking an accidental nap (no doubt from all that focus on notes and dynamics and so on), I failed to post on what is now yesterday. And so I leave you with a thought and tumble (deliberately this time) back into bed...

I think there does persist, however, a basic misunderstanding about rhyme and the use of rhyme. Rhyme is not an “ornament”—it is essential to a rhyming poem; without it, the poem would not have happened. That is, the poet does not “know” exactly what the poem is going to say and “translate” it into rhyming verse—or shouldn’t, in my book. On the contrary, it is the strange dream-logic connections of the rhymes themselves that lead the poem forward, perhaps into territory the poet herself had not intuited. Rhyme is a method of composition. 

                           --Alicia Stallings

Read the interview here.

A little mystery for Advent

A challenge still with us fifty years later from the woman who turned my head around when I was a mere child:

It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. About the turn of the century, Henry James wrote that the young woman of the future, though she would be taken out for airings in a flying-machine, would know nothing of mystery or manners. James had no business to limit the prediction to one sex; otherwise, no one can very well disagree with him. The mystery he was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery (Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 1962,p. 124.)

What a grand book of essays! And who couldn't love a girl who began with a chicken taught to walk backward and went on to be a woman of words and peacocks?

THALIAD and lake monsters

Luck has riotous marketing skills: it didn't occur to me until just now how odd it is that a post-apocalyptic epic in blank verse was catapulted into the world just at the solstice close of the Mayan calendar. Timing! It's a thing marketers are always going on about, and for once I have it--alas, if only I had realized, had thought ahead and made the requisite Mayan Calendar Apocalypse Marketing Plan, and established a post-apocalyptic marketing event...

Would have been helpful to arrange for a gigantic stone statue to shoulder its way from Lake Otsego, waterfalls pouring from its chest and thighs, followed by reeling birds and the coils of our lake monster. He might flog books door to door like a big Fuller Brush Man who can't take no for an answer. Would be good. Effective, at any rate. And everybody local wants to see what the shy lake monster really looks like. (One of the characters in Thaliad does catch a glimpse of the monster.) Imagine a basalt army of golem-like book salesmen, each with a Santa-pack of books, led by a stone captain, lake monster flung around his neck as a living scarf.

The air is dark and pouring outside, lake blurring into louring cloud and ground and sky... Could be a scene from the start of Thaliad.

* * *

On a less silly note, and just in case you want to get your copy before it really is entirely too late, Thaliad is available: in hardcover (limited edition) and paperback from Phoenicia Publishing's online store; in paperback (stocked via Ingram) for bookstore orders; in paperback from Amazon here and abroad. For more information, hop to the Phoenicia Thaliad page.

ORDER FROM PHOENICIA'S ONLINE STORE

ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

ORDER FROM AMAZON.UK

ORDER FROM AMAZON EUROPE

Mayan Apocalypse or Mayan Party Day report:  First it poured so hard that the lake and sky became confused. Then it sleeted a while. That was when I did my errands and took the forgotten mushrooms to school (part of a book report, if you can believe it), as my youngest remembered scales, lemon drop, peasant vest and hat for "The Balek Scales." But not mushrooms. Now the roofs are white, and the snow is sticking despite the soaked ground. A three-story sparrow frolic is going on at the feeder just beyond the window. The least upset, and they whirl into the ravel of rugosa vines and sit for a moment before flitting back. But the little kestrel will be too fast for them if he comes . . . poor little party-sparrows.

Myers and more--

A THANKS

I am grateful to noted critic D. G. Myers, who first listed Catherwood with best historical novels, then put A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage on a list of best books of 2012, and afterward reviewed the novel.

I'm  also glad of John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, who introduced the novel to Myers (a fact I learned via Twitter), and who has consistently supported my books.

MYERS, AGAIN

And now he has posted a response to Paul Elie's article in The New York Times, Has Fiction Lost Its Faith, that includes A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. It's lovely to be in company with Christopher Beha, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, and more...

WHO

is D. G. Myers? In his own words: A critic and literary historian at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at the Ohio State University, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and have written for Commentary, Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas,American Literary History, and other journals.

APOLOGIES

to those who commented on the two lost posts! I'll try not to do that again...

ADVENT

Just have to say that I adore singing the soprano part in Benjamin Britten's setting of Robert Southwell's  "This Little Babe" (actually the lines are a portion of "New Heaven, New Warre" (1595.) I do wish Elizabeth had not been so murderous in Southwell's case (hanged, drawn, quartered) but flung him back to the Continent to write more poems. And I also wish that I had had a proper musical education! Nevertheless, it's thrilling to sing this one with a choir.

On another book round-up...

I am pleased to have two books on John Wilson's annual book list: Favorite Books of 2012. He is the editor of Books and Culture and a formidably well-read man. Please hop over to the online annex to the magazine and see what they are and what he has to say...

The previous list for year's end was from critic D. G. Myers, Best fiction of 2012. His review was here.

Advent hymn commission--

Some time ago I had a commission to write words for a hymn celebrating the Bicentennial at Christ Church Cooperstown. The lyrics were first sung to the hymn tune St. Anne, though later to another that suited them better--I've forgotten which one it was and shall have to look it up.

And now I've had another request, this time to write words for an Advent hymn, and to a particular tune, Merla Watson's Awake, O Israel. Advent hymns are somewhat rare, it seems. The words seem to beg for a more lyrical and perhaps mystical tune, but they fit the distinctive meter of the music. It has been sung three times this season. The second stanza has been used as a chorus, as well.

When I was younger, I disliked being asked for occasional poems--as though one could only write such things when burning with inspiration--but now I find them an interesting challenge. That may say that age brings a hint of wisdom, or it may say something else entirely.


INFANT LIGHT
Advent Song 

In winter comes
The snow and darkness
Of the ebbing year when breath
Is white on air
And all the world
Shrunken, leaning into death.

Let’s braid our branches
Into an Advent wreath,
Weaving boxwood with bay,
And light our candles,
The rose and purples,
Leading us to Christmas Day.

In the mid-winter
The seeking Magi
Pursue a star in flight—
We are the Magi
Still trailing after,
Waiting on the infant Light.

O starry Christ-child,
Who knew our names
Before the worlds were made . . .
Again in winter,
We’ll hail thee, Child
In peace and love arrayed.

Myrrh for innocence

Borrowed from Wesley Hill's Writing in the Dust tumblr log:

In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today--besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow--is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.

That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.

In the leafless hills of western Connecticut, this is the only Christmas spirit that could possibly matter now.

 --Ross Douthat, “The Loss of the Innocents”

***
Wesley is a young theology professor, a recent Ph.D. grad of Durham University (UK) and professor at Trinity in Ambridge, PA. His first book is Washed and Waiting.

Stowaways! Or, mice twice, thrice--

Sent my daughter for birthday cake from our corner bakery, and she reports two little mice flashed by her feet when she got in the car. Drat! Southern forest mice invaded my Corolla again in Cullowhee. They build nests in my air filter, and I am forced to release the little Southerners into the cold Yankee wild or else snap their tiny backbones in mousetraps. Then I go get yet another clean air filter so I don't breathe mice-pelleted and -nested air. Alas for all of us.

***

". . . the true protest is beauty." -Phil Ochs

***

I have come to the end of a great many things, not just a long trip, and now I am going to polish the long sequence of poems, The Book of the Red King, and also the wild 3-in-1 fantasy tale that I wrote for my youngest, The Aerenghast Trilogy (The Infinite Library, Magna Wildwood, and Wizardry.) And I need to get back into the swing of choir and Advent, as Christmas is coming...

2:27 a.m.
Back from shenanigans in Atlanta and Cullowhee... More anon.

D. G. Myers and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Literary critic D. G. Myers has posted a long, insightful review of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage on A Commonplace Blog. The essay is beautiful; I hope you will read it.

If you have a comment, please post it there. Comments off.

The Next Big Thing - author meme

Lovely poet friend Luisa Igloria invited me to join the self-interview experiment called The Next Big Thing. Writers participating get to answer 8-10 questions, and then tag five other writer friends to post their own “next big thing” the following Wednesday. I'll add a list of the writers later.

1. What is the working title of your book?

In 2012, my ninth, tenth, and eleventh books came out--a thing that, combined with a stint as judge for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature, seems and was insanity.

The first was a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction (Mercer University Press.) This book combines various threads from family lore into a new fabric of adventure. Soon it will be out in paperback.

Then came a collection of formal poetry, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press), wonderfully decorated with green man art by my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins. It hasn't been out long but is a limited edition.

And last is December's Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing) a post-apocalyptic narrative in blank verse, centering on seven children who leave home.

So 2012 saw three books in three genres in three countries. As Thaliad is the most recent, I will focus on it. (Upcoming books: Catherwood will be back in print; Glimmerglass; and Maze of Blood.)

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

In July of 2010, the story simply appeared in the curious corridors of my brain. I never expected to publish the poem as a book (an epic poem? in 2012?) but wrote entirely for my own pleasure. I published a section of the fourth part in qarrtsiluni, and afterward received the surprise of several requests to publish based on the excerpt. (Another fragment of the poem appeared in Kim Bridgford's Mezzo Cammin.) One was from Elizabeth Adams (managing editor of quarrtsiluni with Dave Bonta), and I decided she was the most appropriate publisher. And I like her Phoenicia Publishing. In fact, if you don't know her small press, please go take a look.

3. What is the genre of the book?

Blank verse poetry that hews to epic conventions, translated into our day. Some novelistic conventions.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Why should a book be a movie? That is the proper question. Because for once a mid-list writer might make a living? Because people don't read poetry?

Unknown child actors, for the most part.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

If I had wanted it to be one-sentence long, I would have written it so!

Their world destroyed, seven children fare forth to make a new world? Children build a matriarchal world in the face of natural-world and human violence after devastation? The long effort to build something of beauty and meaning in the face of catastrophe?

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency/publisher?

Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal. Owned by that native New Yorker, Elizabeth Adams, designer and artist and writer and more.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote it in an intense burst through July and into the beginning of August. Then I fiddled a long time.

8. What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?

I am going to have to take that one as a question about artistic debt, since I don't think the book is like much contemporary work. No doubt I would never have written such a poem if I had never read the Anglo-Saxon poets, the Gawain poet, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Logue, and others. A reader versed in poetry may detect some homage to Homer, the Anglo-Saxons, Milton, and Cavafy. And though it is post-apocalyptic, I would say that the narrative owes a bigger debt to a passion for fairy tales than to an interest in, say, the current spate of post-apocalyptic novels. I am afraid that I have read none of them, aside from those read in 2012 while on the NBA judging panel, and that was too late to influence Thaliad.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It blossomed in my head. No doubt the reading mentioned above made a difference. I also have a fondness for blank verse. Every time I try to add a sentence about why, it sounds downright erotic. Flexible. Pleasurable. Easy-to-muscular rhythms.

10. What else about your book/your writing might pique the reader’s interest?

Thaliad is a spectacularly beautiful object, from the jacket or cover to the framing full-page illustrations to the title page to the wealth of gorgeous vignettes by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. The design by Elizabeth Adams is immaculate. The profuse art that decorates the pages subtly adds to the narrative.

Home.Clive.Pinned

HOME 

I'm posting from beautiful Cullowhee, North Carolina, where the clouds have bedded down on the mountains, and those in turn have gone a lovely fawn color while the eldest trees (clothed in lichen) are a luminous pale green in the rain. Everything is soft and waiting, with little birds flying to and from the feeders. It has a lovely Advent sort of feeling.

CLIVE

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has been working on the bookplate for lucky early buyers of Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, just out!) You may see his work here.

PINNED

Although my daughter declares Pinterest a silly site (which, indeed, it often is--though not here, I hope), I have collected a lot of Thaliad images here and made a page collecting all my books into one place here.

Mercer Frolics in Atlanta

I'm back in Cullowhee, North Carolina after two days in Atlanta with the 23rd annual Mercer Authors Luncheon. You might think that a luncheon would be a luncheon, but in this case it is a reception and dinner for 65 dear friends of Mercer University Press and some authors, and then some more events the next day, primarily book signings and a fancy luncheon for a much large number. It was quite posh. I was terribly well fed, and aspire to stay at the Intercontinental Buckhead more often... I didn't take a single picture but will post some links when Mercer pictures go up. Lisa Alter spoke (another wonderful Globe Pequot book! one popped up as winner in nonfiction at the National Book Awards), along with Ann Ross, Jeffrey Small (who I met the night before at the reception), and Louis W. Sullivan.

I had a grand time meeting Marc Jolley, Marsha Luttrell, Mary Beth Kosowski, Jenny Toole, and sundry other Mercerians. In addition, I chatted with a large number of bigwigs (the President, the Provost, and other vital P-people.)

And when it was all at an end, I had a lovely visit with Robin Rudd, future children's book author, who was one of my students when I did a summer gig as writer-in-residence for the MFA program at Hollins in 2010. We used to get up early and walk the loop of campus a couple of times before the world got--as it did--hot.

Idle thoughts on the road--

On the road... Zipping from western North Carolina to Atlanta today. If you are insanely curious, you may go to the Events page and see why. Otherwise, I shall report tomorrow night.

Last night I was watching Stephen Colbert and laughing heartily (though still  not regretting my longtime lack of television--and after all, I can see him with Peter Jackson or the late Maurice Sendak on the web), when it occurred to me that he must have had the most astonishing case of ADHD when he was a boy. I do hope he gave his mother a medal when he grew up. I think it's interesting that he loves Tolkien so much because Tolkien is the king of slow pace, and I am tempted to blame Colbert as a zeitgeist figure for increasing the pace of books and movies.

On the other hand, I feel oddly akin to him in certain ways. Family tragedy in childhood seem to be tempering for some people. And he is a fellow South Carolinian who got rid of his accent in childhood because he observed that people found Southerners to be stupid, often based on their accents. (Of course, I got rid of mine, or most of it, because my Yankee teacher was sure I was more than stupid!) It's lovely to have a South Carolinian known widely for his intelligence and quick wit.

Tumbleweed

I have abandoned the family in New York and gone rambling down South--last night I was in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and tonight I will be in Cullowhee, NC. On the 7th I'll be going to a dinner with Mercer University Press and their supporters in Atlanta, and the next day I'll be doing a book-signing for my 2012 novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, and The Throne of Psyche (2011 poetry collection) and attending an author luncheon for 400. And this will be my last set of events for 2012. I'll be doing more for this year's poetry books, The Foliate Head and the just-out Thaliad, in 2013. (Click on the tabs above if you want to know more about any of those books...)

Sweet collaborations--

Artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and poet and Aberystwyth University professor (now department head and Rendel Professor) Damian Walford Davies talk about poetry, painting, collaboration, and more here. Various poets come in for a mention, sometimes obliquely, and Damian reads some of his poems inspired by Clive's paintings. I'm glad Clive also read a poem by his dear friend Catriona Urquhart, who passed from this world on May Day seven years back.

The recording is a little wonky at the start, but hang on.

* * *
In related news, today Clive will post an image of the hand-pulled bookplate for Thaliad. Those will go to the first 50 who bought the book after launch plus the hardcover pre-orderers, I believe. I'm grateful that he and Beth Adams are going to such pains.

To the poets--

Thoughts after reading some contemporary poetry... They might be in place of a few reviews, or maybe they're reminders to me about things I knew but felt like jotting down. 

* * *

If you are [insert sex or color], please love the world's people in your poetry. All. No matter what color and sex. To put it another way: give the people in your poems your full and fair attention, even if their behaviors are feckless or monstrous.

Aspire to be like God. Remember this? "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten...." Give your only-begotten verse child to the world so that people may have more life. More life, raised and intense. (That means the poem must have life. And that's a difficult demand.)

Love the reader. He does not need to be clubbed on the head with your ideas of social justice. In fact, lay off the ideas of social justice in your poems. If you love the world well and truly enough in your poems, you don't need to "say" a thing about social justice. Go volunteer at your local food bank or soup kitchen; you'll be a lot more useful to this world. And you might get some of those raised and intense poems out of the experience...

Forgive. Have mercy. If you don't forgive and have mercy, your poetry will be marred by hate and rigidity and the inability to remove your metaphorical sunglasses and see the world's light, falling without passion on all men and women everywhere.

Careful about your progenitors. Never follow writers who are possessed by a spirit of rage and unforgiveness that leads toward the use of poetry as a form of vengeance.

Sit with humility at the feet of the great masters.

Be willing to suffer transformation.

Even if you write short lyric poems, don't leave out story. It worked for Homer, Shakespeare, and Yeats. It can work for you and me.

Small horn toot for Catherwood--

Trala, Catherwood is coming! (The novel was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1996, and afterward by the Bard imprint and in French, Spanish, and German translation. And Braille...) I was just writing some materials and packaging up review clips and so on for Mercer. I am so glad. It's always a good sign when publishers want to bring one's out-of-print books back into print. I've kept the ebook rights for myself, so it'll be a physical book. And the rebirth of a book seems like a good thing to announce on the first Sunday of Advent.

Thaliad, etc.

Marly-mama
After nine hours to and fro and in Bug Tussle, New York for a wrestling meet, I slept briefly and rose to roust the youngest for another day of it. As I must go sing some Benjamin Britten and Handel, I escaped my wrestling-mom duties...

Thaliad thank you
I want to thank everybody who ordered Thaliad on launch day. Much appreciated! It's not your average Jill and Joe who are up for an adventurous post-apocalyptic epic in blank verse, even when the book is profusely adorned by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and beautifully designed by Phoenicia Publishing's Elizabeth Adams. If you are curious and would like a peep at excerpts, author comments, early reviews, and images, please go here and here.

Present time
As it is the time of gifts for various holidays, I have a duty to my various publishers to remind you that I have published three books this year and one last: my 11th book, Thaliad from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal; a collection of poems with gorgeous "green man" art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, The Foliate Head, from Stanza Press in the UK; the wanderer's tale related to my own family history, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, from Mercer University Press; and The Throne of Psyche, another collection, from Mercer. Also still in print is--oddly--my very first book, Little Jordan, still in hardcover print through David R. Godine, Publisher.

Postscript Addendum, clarifying much, 
and using my J. K. Rowling license to SHOUT in CAPS
CLARIFICATION: Man, the things my friends write me letters about! Particularly the facebook friends. Hey, I call ALL HAMLETS, VILLAGES, and DOTS on the map where Cooperstonian kids go to wrestle BUG TUSSLE, irregardless of the name.

O happy day! THALIAD is born.

Thalia, as conceived by the masterful
Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales.

Today is the launch day for Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing), with a post-apocalyptic epic narrative in blank verse (what a mouthful!) poem by me, profuse art by major artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and lovely, immaculate design by Elizabeth Adams of Phoenicia. For excerpts, clips of the first reviews, comments by poets and novelists, and a peep at some of the art, you may go to my Thaliad page. And there's a wealth of information on the Phoenicia site.

PUB DATE CELEBRATION. Receive a small, original work of art, an incredibly generous offer from Clive Hicks-Jenkins: SPECIAL BOOKPLATE OFFER: The first 50 orders (any edition) received before Dec 25, 2012 will also receive an original, hand-pulled, relief-print bookplate, specially designed and printed by Clive Hicks-Jenkins forThaliad. To receive your bookplate, you must forward your order confirmation from the online store, or from Amazon, with your name and address, to phoeniciapublishing(at)gmail(dot) com. It will be sent to you separately by mail.

To see Clive's posts about the art for Thaliad, go here.

While this book is so beautiful that I'd love to be able to strew them about the world the way nature tosses out her abundant flowers, I cannot; much labor and cost went into it. Please find below (along with a lovely horse) how to obtain one for yourself, to hold, to read, to revel in the gorgeous art and immaculate design work.

Want to support the independent press movement? If you wish to benefit Phoenicia Publishing the most, you may order directly from them. And if you buy from a non-Phoenicia site, you may wish to send Elizabeth Adams an email note so that you land on her highly desirable email list! Or just let her know how you like the book... You may write her at phoeniciapublishing [at] gmail [dot] com.

For the hardcover:

Pre-order today at a special price: 
LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER: $23.40

OR:

Order after Nov. 30 at $26.00,

available directly from Phoenicia via PayPal or credit card.

For the paperback: $13.95 US, CANADA
£9.00 UK; €11.40 EUROPE (price may vary slightly by country)
ORDER FROM Phoenicia Publishing ONLINE STORE
ORDER FROM the Phoenica Publishing page
ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM
ORDER FROM AMAZON.UK
ORDER FROM AMAZON EUROPE

Vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

P. S.

And here's a first peep at finished copies of Thaliad. The first fifty buyers get an extra-special present, courtesy of Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Phoenicia Publishing... 2 days left on hardcover pre-orders.

Caustic Cover Critic on Thaliad

The Caustic Cover Critic a.k.a. JRSM has a review post up about Thaliad, and he likes the poem and the art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the design. Here's a clip from the start:

A while ago I was looking at a poet's website and saw that her next book was a post-apocalyptic blank verse epic, with specially commissioned illustrations. Someone's written a book just for me! I thought to myself. And Marly Youmans has, it would seem, done just that: Thaliad is a marvellous work, an exciting and heartbreaking myth of origin for a society born of a clutch of children who survive a nuclear war.

His next line amused me! It depends on a common mis-pronunciation of my last name (which is, of course, spelled improperly. The Youmans clan evidently can pronounce but not spell! My great-grandfather Nathaniel Yeomans and sometimes Youmans is evidently to blame for the switch in spelling, but we still pronounce the name as YO-munz. I suppose that proves that we can get things half right.)

And JRSM selects a lovely little group of vignettes and covers by Clive at the close, illustrating Beth's elegant page design as well.

Last day for a Phoenicia Publishing discount on the pre-order for a hardcover of Thaliad is the 30th... today and tomorrow left to knock on the door of Phoenicia and buy in a way that benefits both you and the press. And thanks to Beth for sending a link to the Caustic Critic's post...

Gary asks a question...

Marly, here is your assignment for the week now that you have signed your contracts and judged your contest. 

In your life and career as a poet, are you writing for yourself, for an existing audience of poetry fans, or are you tying to help expand those who appreciate poetry (and yours, specifically)? 

I think that this is a question, if answered thoughtfully by any author (or any builder of any creative output for that matter) could be a good guide to how successful they feel. In other words, does their idea of what they WANT their output to do for the world match their approach in how they deliver that output to the world -- and how far along are they to reaching their particular goal (and what could / would they change to help better achieve their goal). 

I expect my answer in sonnet form. In French. 

Thanks, Gary 

BEING 14 BURBLINGS (14, as in lines of a sonnet) 
+ SALTED WITH FRENCH for Gary

Sacre bleu! Writing is different from marketing or promotion--very different. Poetry and business do not often go together. Even on the rare occasions when they appear to go together, they don't go together. And writing poetry is different from writing prose. Usually people who find joy in playing with words aren't the same people who find joy in playing with business. (Gary Dietz, you may be the exception.)

When I draft a poem, I am not in the least concerned with readers. If the poem is any good, I am concerned with an alien, vertical infusion of force passing through my body and soul. I'm trying to capture some of that for my very own. (If it's not good, I'm just fiddling. Fiddling for a long time can be enjoyable and produce some quite pleasant work, but it's not the same as being struck by a metaphysical asteroid--and that's the strange sort of thing that a poet ought to desire.)

So, no, I have absolutely no thought of any possible reader here or in any other world when I make a poem. I am in the grasp of word-pleasure, a certain sort of intense, self-obliterating celebration.

That means I am not even thinking of me as a reader. If thinking of myself or of readers, I would not write as well as if I let myself be cast away by the tide of the poem. No poet would. Not one. All poets desire to be that kind of castaway. (Well, maybe not what we used to call the avant garde. They're up to other things.)

Poetry is evidently one of the weirder activities a human being may devote him- or herself to pursuing. Because the Muse wants all. Whenever the Muse visits, she seeks to seize.

Not only that, the proper stance toward the poets who wrote memorable poetry in the past is one of humility. So a poet's desires must demand a kind of humility toward the past and a kind of self-obliteration in the present. What a weird pursuit!

Do I have "an existing audience" of poetry fans? Yes. Is it large? No. It is composed of, insofar as I can tell from observation and what people say, writers and painters and bloggers and friends and kind strangers who love poetry and like to own poetry books--particularly people who love form and force in poetry. Because I do a certain amount of collaborative work with artists and designers, I collect a few readers among their fans as well.

How do I know such people exist? Some of them write email notes or leave facebook messages or blog comments or twitter messages or some such. Sometimes a publisher tells me what fans say. Sometimes I get a letter on paper. I get comments on places like Eratosphere or blogs, particularly when I publish in an online journal like Mezzo Cammin or qarrtsiluni, which has a large readership and an editor who sometimes lets me know how many readers show up. Those places may be where I have the most readers; certainly far more than in a paper journal or even a poetry book.

Do I worry a lot about the number of readers? No. Saperlipopette! That poetry no longer sells the way it once did is a hard pebble in the shoe, impossible to remove. I have mentioned before discussing with an editor the dropping of a line of poetry from a well-known press with well-known poets. Why? Because not one book they had published in the past ten years broke the mark of selling 300 copies. Holala. That's fairly sad, given the number of potential readers in the U.S. We lost readers in the very long wake of Modernism, and I alone will not bring those readers back to poetry. Easier entertainment has replaced the arts for many, many people in our culture. So I am glad that there are people out there in the world who make it a friendly goal to try and get young people and others to read more poetry. It's not my calling. Nevertheless, I'm always glad to talk to people about poetry.

And what do I do about such things when I have a new book?  I make a plan with my publisher (unless said publisher is on the other side of the ocean, in which case I do a rather less) and try new ways of reaching readers. I tour. I do various things on the internet. I go to West Chester. I record and let the wondrous Paul Digby make videos of my poems. Etcetera.

But the best way a poet of genuine ability and sufficient obsession can improve the status of poetry, including her own, is to write good poems without the least worry about the status of poetry. The only way a poet can lodge a poem in longterm human memory is to pursue the Muse with sufficient stamina and passion and joy. Period.

Luck helps. It's always a mistake to discount sheer blooming luck in a culture that is as jammed with garbage (zut!) and diamonds as ours. If the poet is true to the chase, eventually he or she will find readers.

How am I doing? Well enough so that my second, third, and fourth poetry books were not submitted but solicited, sometimes by more than one publisher. Enough to get magazine requests. Enough to have a little band of readers. Enough to be asked to do panels and events. It's something. Sure, I'd like more readers. What poet and writer would not?

But those are just facts that leave out the joy and word-frolic and metaphysical asteroids. And that's what the goal always is: the joy, the word-frolic, the metaphysical asteroids. And in those measures (un jeu de mots!), I am a happy poet.

Lovely

4 days left for pre-order discount on Thaliad hardcovers at Phoenicia. Just saw the first photographs of the finished book, and it looks as beautiful as designer Beth Adams and artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and I dreamed. My book page here. Order here.

Shake, shake, shake--

Shaker births,
Shaker marriages...

Christmas is on my brain, as I got a sudden commission to write Advent lyrics for a song yesterday evening... Eighteen lines later, I was thinking about how I prefer requests like that one to shopping for Christmas. There's a chasm between the pure ideal of the infant of love and light and the great American shopping frenzy, now on shameful display for the world to see in YouTube Black Friday videos of lunging and shrieking Walmart buyers.

So often there's a canyon between the flogging of goods and the peaceable way that would be good to live. And even the more tasteful of U. S. catalogue peddlers can show what is either ignorance or some lack of harmony with their subject.... I was amused to look at a catalogue of Shaker reproductions and gifts for Christmas. It comes from a perfectly fine company run by people who are careful with their replicas of Shaker furnishings; my husband put together a kit of one of their Elder Chairs for my father in his illness, and we have a child's rocker he made for one of the children. Shaker design was a wondrous thing, and I suppose sometimes it is hard to remember--now that the Shakers are mostly objects and history--that they were about far more than furniture.

But what can one possibly make of the peddling of this family motto, declaring: Our Family is a circle of strength and love. With every birth and every union, the circle grows. Etc.  Do they forget for a long and potentially lucrative moment who and what the Shakers were? How they saw the world? Family motto? Do they not know why the Shakers died out, aside from a few stray members? No births! No unions!

The elaborate cut paper with fleur de lis and the sentiments remind me of a Shaker dictum. "If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity."

For which, Nathaniel Hawthorne excoriated them in journal and story, by the by. He was repulsed by life at Hancock Shaker Village when he and Melville visited there. It would be hard to imagine that such a lover of solitude and retirement could adopt the idea of dormitories and shared work and meals, even though he was once a part of a utopian project (lucky for us, as we have The Blithedale Romance.)
*

Nothing says "Shaker" like an adorable Mouse Nativity.
Right, that's certainly in the Shaker worldview!
Though they did love Christmas and children and toys...

Book promises

Contracts on my mind...

I've just had two requests for story reprints, so that's pleasant.

And today I shall send back three book contracts with some amendments but signed. I've taken a long time to finalized these, and have dithered a good deal. That's what comes of not bothering to get another agent and yet hating to do business. I'm keeping ebook rights and a few others.

FSG, 1996

One of these contracts means that Catherwood will be back in print. Catherwood was doing quite nicely in the way of finding readers and had moved from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover to the newly revived Bard imprint when the HarperCollins implosion (that's what comes of eating too much, HarperCollins!) took down many imprints, including Bard. I felt it as a great disappointment, one that was followed by my next book being delayed to days after 9-11. I do have the luck, don't I?

Then there's Glimmerglass, a somewhat fantastical book with many threads--growing older, failure and renewal, chasing the Muse, love and marriage, siblings, murderous impulses, a flood, and more. Despite being somewhere on the continuum between what is called realism and what is called speculative fiction, the setting is nonetheless identifiable as a version of Cooperstown. Parts take place in and under the lake, in a wonderful little gate house that I've called the "Seven Dwarves House" because it has seven doors, and in an imaginary great house not so terribly different from others around the lake. And yet, in one key way, terribly different...

And last is Maze of Blood, a book loosely based on the deep-South life and times of that unusual boy and man, pulp writer Robert Howard, with faux-Howard pieces interspersed, and to some degree channeling my hot summer weeks near Lexsy and in Collins, Georgia. I know that boy and his strangeness, and I know that hot Southern world, so I had great fun frolicking with him.

So I am sticking with Mercer for my 12th and 13th books, and by then I will have four first editions with them, a number that rivals my four with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with lovely acquiring editors Elisabeth Dyssegaard and Robbie Mayes. And I suppose that will mean having the stellar team of Burt and Burt again as book designers. The pair designed A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012) and The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011.)

That reminds me, I haven't mailed my Thaliad contract, and the book's almost out. Coming!

Me and bf Homer

Collage vignette for THALIAD
by the great Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales!
www.phoeniciapublishing.com

SILLY THALIAD CONVERSATION

Poet/novelist, aware of that people want new electronic games and semi-alien gadgets for Christmas instead of a blank verse narrative poem, even if it is post-apocalyptic: I need to get together with Beth in the next few weeks and brainstorm. It's not easy for an epic poem these days.

Husband too smart to become a writer, expressing his sympathy as he sees fit: Took Homer years to get the recognition he deserved.

WHAT WERE HOMER'S BOOKSCAN NUMBERS? 

It's a thought. Worthy of a cartoon.

Mr. Bookseller: "I don't think this Homer guy has the numbers we're looking for. Let's just order one of his next book."

Ms. Bookseller:  "If that."

Finally, an explanation for what's wrong with government, academia, and The DaVinci Code

A re-post from 9/28/05: I stumbled on this one while hunting through the past and was surprised to realize how much this strange book influenced my writing at the time. I wonder if it's common for a nonfiction book to take such hold of a writer's imagination... And I can't say that it has happened since.

Like everybody else, I've wondered why the world sometimes appears such a miscreant place, full of lies and badly written books and mean-spirited nonsense.

So I am glad to find the answer.

In a footnote to Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, Marva Dawn cites one William Stringfellow's description of the tactics used by fallen powers and principalities: "denial of truth, doublespeak and overtalk, secrecy and boasts of expertise, surveillance and harassment, exaggeration and deception, cursing and conjuring, usurpation and absorption, diversion and demoralization, and the violence of babel (including verbal inflation, libel, rhetorical wantonness, sophistry, jargon, incoherence, falsehood, and blasphemy.)"

Think about it. Government and politico-speak. Academia and the glorification of the impenetrable. Bad but bestselling books.

All, all explained!

*******
Mysteries of life settled, I wonder if that Stringfellow was a relation of my beloved Mrs. Stringfellow, who taught me in first and second grades at University Terrace in Baton Rouge?

******
I should add that the Dawn book is a very curious one, suggesting that some of the ways we human beings see the world have changed far more radically that we commonly understand. "The Powers" have crept into my imagination and forced me to write several stories and poems, including "The Nesting Doll." 

Addendum: See Philippa Robbins' Red Riding Hood, Wolf, and Granny nesting dolls: here. They cover several posts... Thanks, Clive!

Thaliad reminder: one week left

Reminder: one week left to purchase Thaliad in hardcover at the pre-order discount directly from Phoenicia Publishing (and so helping a small press as much as is possible with your order.) 

Post-apocalyptic story in blank verse, with jacket and profuse interior art by major artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales, beautifully designed by Elizabeth Adams of Montreal... The first pre-orders will be limited edition hardcovers through Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal. Afterward the hardcover limited edition and the paperback will be available through the website, or via various Amazon sites abroad and in the U.S. Books will be shipping around November 30th.

In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time. --Lee Smith

 For more comments by authors, excerpts, and clips from the first review, go here.

I celebrate my Thanksgiving birthday with Keats--

I give thanks for a conflagration of cake with yet another birthday with an excerpt from a document written on November 22nd in 1817--a letter from John Keats to his friend Benjamin Bailey that is full of dear concern for a friend, bright musings, and the ideal. He may have despaired that his name was "writ in water," but it was the kind of water that splits rocks or springs up as new life...

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty. In a word, you may know my favorite speculation by my first book, and the little song I send in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters. The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning - and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts! It is a 'Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me, - for it has come as auxiliary to another favorite speculation of mine, - that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger as you do after truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness - to compare great things with small - have you never by being Surprised with an old Melody - in a delicious place - by a delicious voice, felt over again your very Speculations and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul - do you not remember forming to yourself the singer's face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so - even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high - that the Protrotype must be here after - that delicius face you will see. What a time! I am continually running away from the subject - sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind - one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits - who would exist partly on Sensation partly on thought - to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind - such an one I consider your's and therefore it is necessary to your eternal Happiness that you not only drink this old Wine of Heaven, which I shall call the redigestion of our most ethereal Musings on Earth; but also increase in knowledge and know all things.

More Yolanda Sharpe

Part two of an interview with artist and soprano Yolanda Sharpe here.

Biz and numerology

In answer to a question from a reader about which of my books are in print: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad (in a couple of weeks), The Foliate Head, The Throne of Psyche, Val/Orson, and... the hardcover of my very first book, Little Jordan. All of those are in print in hardcover, and Thaliad and The Throne of Psyche are available in paperback. Catherwood will be back in print soon. So that means seven of my eleven books will be in print. Glimmerglass and Maze of Blood are forthcoming.

Eleven. And soon thirteen. I feel rather like Bilbo Baggins, preparing for his "eleventy-first" birthday party. How did I manage so many? And yet it is a mere speck by the count of the Victorians like George MacDonald and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. I've barely begun.

Yolanda yacks--

Please pop by to take a look at the first part of an interview with Yolanda Sharpe, artist and mezzo-soprano, at the IAM-Otsego website. Interview by brand new webmaster Benjamin Miller. Please leave a comment there if you enjoy their work! Comments off here.

The ideal in twilight...

Vignette for Thaliad
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Wales)

The time we are given

Will they say of our time in the arts that people chose surface glitter over the glow of transfiguration, shallows over deep-sea depths, flat screens over multiple dimensions? It is harder for artists to achieve in eras when the trivial and the ephemeral crowd the culture, and when artists often run after such things?

Beauty

Achieved beauty in art breeds more beauty. In some sense, Shakespeare was the glory shining out from his wonderful contemporaries.

Foolishness

Foolishness, I embrace you. I marry you. I let you fly free and then return like a boomerang bird to my hand. I am willing. I put on the Fool's mask and see.

Response

The sun burns; the moon reflects light back. So the reader or viewer or listener and the artist stand, each shining at the other, making a circle, a bond, a marriage.

Kingdom

I choose to believe that inside the great world of what is called the arts, a kingdom stands. I aspire to be a citizen, with all the rights and privileges thereof.

Travel in time and space

Past the limits of desire. Past understanding.

Transformation

The most potent action of art is a kind of lifetime's self-transformation as beautiful creations pour through the artist, leaving a residue in the soul. Art is not just about making something outside oneself; it is about soul-making. It is the transformation that comes to the willing soul when power sweeps through... Just as prophetic utterance changes the prophet, art changes its maker. How hard is it for such things to happen when most no longer believe in the strange, intangible soul?

12 days till...

HAWKING + PEDDLING

Reminder of meritorious possibility! Act on this while eating bitter melon and you will never suffer from monobrow or baldness or general stupidity!

Believe it?

PHOENICIA SPECIAL TILL NOV. 30th 

The Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal) pre-order discount price for the hardcover of the upcoming Thaliad is good for 12 more days. If you want a copy, that's a good way to get it, not because it's the very cheapest way (no doubt, it isn't, as you may choose the paperback or miraculously discover a tea-stained copy at a yard sale in twenty or thirty years) but because you manage to both get a lower price (always okay with us, no?) and also support a young small press that tries to thrive and sprout new leaves in the Sahara of the Bozart (it may have been what Mencken called the South in his day, but I think that particular desert blows its sands across many places these days.)

BETH + CLIVE + IMAGE ARCHIVE

Publisher Beth Adams is a grand designer to have--she writes and paints and draws and takes photographs and sings, so she has plenty of sensitivity to nuance and text placement. And she takes pains, which is a wonderful thing.

And of course she has good material to work with, given the wonderful artwork that Clive Hicks-Jenkins has made for this book (and for The Foliate Head.) Just was taking a peek--I want to share all the still-secret pictures that we have not shown. They are special... So if you don't desire a copy of your very own, well, you should go take a look at his wondrous Thaliad images and his archive of work done for the book. You can find it here.

NYC glimpses

Ivory dreams. The National Book Foundation put us up
 in The Essex after our first hotel was washed out by Sandy.
This shop window is not far from the hotel.

Lalique and Footlongs

Shop window with reflections of Central Park
trees and equestrian statue.

Art deco portals at the Essex.
"THIS CAR AVAILABLE"

At the National Book Award frolics

Greek revival ceiling at Cipriani Wall Street.

Rebecca with Anne and Gary Schmidt.
Gary was the wonderful leader of our judging panel.

Bar, Wall Street Cipriani.

Judith Ortiz Cofer with Rachel and Steve Sheinkin,
Finalist in Young People's Literature for Bomb.

Our panel's star, Susan Cooper...
(Susan Cooper Cronym)

With my daughter Rebecca.

Table companions, poets Dana Levin and Patrick Rosal,
judges for the poetry award.

Author Sophia Quintero with Patrick Rostal.

Cipriani Wall Street.

Picked Sagittarius and Scorpio, as my birthday lands
on the cusp between them.

With Judith Ortiz Cofer. Devoured by judge-corsages.

Fellow YPL panelist Daniel Ehrenhaft, author and now head
of the Soho Teen imprint, along with his wife Jessica,
a vice president at Scholastic.

Rebecca Beatrice Miller in her new pixie cut, all curls gone!
Judges Susan Orlean and Judith Shulevitz in the background.

Table 55 assembling...

Table 55.

Judith Ortiz Cofer and Rebecca.