At right: a precious wentletrap by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... The Fool's beloved is the lunar lady, Precious Wentletrap.
Saturday, November 23, 2019
The Red King's Friends
At right: a precious wentletrap by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... The Fool's beloved is the lunar lady, Precious Wentletrap.
10 comments:
Alas, I must once again remind large numbers of Chinese salesmen and other worldwide peddlers that if they fall into the Gulf of Spam, they will be eaten by roaming Balrogs. The rest of you, lovers of grace, poetry, and horses (nod to Yeats--you do not have to be fond of horses), feel free to leave fascinating missives and curious arguments.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Belated happy birthday wishes!
ReplyDeleteAlso, let me know if there's anything else I can do to help promote the book.
Happy Thanksgiving in advance!
Scott, thank you. I don't think I know how to promote a book of poetry! It's one of the mysteries of the universe...
DeleteA very happy Thanksgiving to you.
surely no more difficult than *publishing* a book of poems. It seems nearly impossible to do.
DeleteDo you have a book? I see that you're a poet...
DeleteIt is sad that such things are hard--and I suspect the first and second are both harder than later ones...
I have a few books..in a binder somewhere..never published. I can't publish them individually first, and stopped trying a long time ago. Well ok ok I *did* send a few in the other day..
DeleteEh, don't give up! I've always been against the flow of what's on trend, and I eventually started publishing books despite that... Things get better. That said, I'd still be writing if no one had ever expressed interest in publishing the things I made.
DeleteTruth be told the real issue is not how hard it is to break into the published-author world (it is ONE but a lesser problem) but that the majority of those both published, and lauded greatly by critics are just horrible. The subjectivity of profundity..never before has quality been so debated, so ignored- excuse my vociferous didactism but no one is talking about this, not since Gioia's famous essay in the 90s...it's murdering my soul quietly, slowly...I guess I'm the only one and "what do *you* know?" I only spent my entire life reading, sacrificing everything else for it. Guess I never learned the politics of the outside world. But what is everyone so afraid of? I feel the fear in their poems. It's broken them.
DeleteWe have the luck of living in a time when many things have turned upside down, certainly, and it is hard to know what to do in the face of it. My way has been just to go on doing what I feel given to do, not worrying that the world is bereft of the old-fashioned critics who used to share the work of writers and support them in words, or that meretricious things are sometimes praised and beautiful, true things ignored. But I know exactly what you mean--"murdering my soul quietly"--and I have seen others harmed deeply by lack of recognition. I have, in the end, cared more for the making of beauty and truth than for anything else, and I have felt that making things transforms a person, down deep. To go on without a sense of having much of an audience is very hard, I know...
DeleteI am thinking that you would like Mary Kinzie's book (particularly the title essay), "The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling."
great book!!!!
ReplyDeleteHey, thanks! Sentiments and extra exclamation marks much appreciated...
Delete