CLIVE'S LATEST PRINT WITH PENFOLD PRESS
Interested in the multitudinous making of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has illuminated so many of my books and made them beautiful? Here's yet another affordable chance to own a bit of his work.
Clip from his website: Launched today, my new print edition with Dan Bugg at Penfold Press, The Tiger’s Bride. It marks a return to a theme I explored in my first print with the Penfold Press, Man Slain by a Tiger. The two prints have a common interest in Staffordshire Pottery and in particular their ‘penny-dreadful’ celebration of awful events. Based on the Staffordshire group titled The Death of the Lion Queen, my print draws on the history of Ellen Bright, who in 1850 at Wombwell’s Menagerie entered a cage of mixed big cats for the entertainment of the crowd.
Go here to read more about the tragical tale of Ellen Bright.
CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
&
THE ELEGY BETA
"But mostly, I’ve been reading this wonderful new novel by Marly Youmans. Holy smokes you guys, the tension in this thing, and the sense of foreignness, and the pacing! I’m not finished with it yet, but I can’t see it being bested for my favorite novel of the year." --writer Mischa Willett, in Buttondown (his newsletter)
Mischa Willett's collection, The Beta Elegy, is suddenly on sale for less than $5. at Amazon--the hardcover! Might be a mistake, but there it is for now...
Here's poet Dan Rattelle's review of The Beta Elegy. Clip: Irreverent. Colloquial. Unexpected. And daringly funny. I once read in a Creative Writing handbook that one should use words like ‘grandmother’ rather than ‘grandma’ in a poem because they carry more weight. Hmm. Willet is also willing to take for granted that his readers’ grandmas also baked lasagna and crocheted superfluous hats. And thus, I do not need to explain the joke. There is also a delightful poem about the sort of typeface used in a note to tell someone he cannot make it to a wedding in Long Island (why is Long Island funny? It just is).
READ THIS!
Of course, a person (this person, anyway) often likes an interview because it's so dratted kindred to her own thoughts about many things, but read it anyway: Amit Majmudar at Tributaries.
Here's a clip, the opening paragraph:
I’ll offer a preliminary historical note on vers libre. As Eliot practiced it, it was really a medley of prior verse forms, roughly juxtaposed. The phonetic runs of blank verse, rhyme, tercets, etc. of, say, Four Quartets, has the same fragmentary nature as the actual snippets of prior literature incorporated into The Waste Land. If practiced like that, free verse required, as its prerequisite, a mastering of or at least familiarity with meter and rhyme in practice; that is, it comes after you get the other ways of writing down. It is a “late” form both in the history of English language poetry and a “late” form in the poet’s technical development. This is no longer understood. Young poets arrive at free verse as their first stop; many never even try writing in meter and rhyme, much less failing often and failing joyfully at it, because they mistakenly locate it in the “past” of poetry.
RECENT ONLINE LINKS
"Youth at the Borderlands"
in
Various poems and prose "tinies"
at
"The Watering Place"
and
"House at the Edge of Sleep"
in
"The Aspen Wish"
in
"The Young Wife's Reply" at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
(Response to "The Husband's Message," c. 970, from the Exeter Book)
