A proper thanks to Dale Favier, and an introduction to his writing-

Thank you to poet Dale Favier, way off on the other side of the continent, for this lovely facebook post... I'm a fan of his as well, so it's very sweet to have him comment on a book of mine this way. (And I should say that I'm grateful to the people on twitter and Facebook who have shared an enthusiasm for my books; I hope that I always remember to thank them, but if anyone has slipped by without my commenting back, I hereby thank them!)

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Dale Favier

9 hours ago · 

• It feels very, very strange to read novels again. I read Marly Youmans' marvelous A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage last year, and all the time there was a surreal throb at the back of my mind: it said, yes, people still write novels. People walking the earth today, they write novels, just like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy did. Because to me, you see, present-day people -- by which I mean people I know online -- they write *poems*, not novels. Marly of course writes poems too, and she's eccentric, so that's all right. But now I'm reading Elizabeth Eslami's no less wonderful novel, Bone Worship, which makes me laugh and laugh. And now I'm thinking, maybe real present-day people write *novels*, too. And I read so slow now! But God, with my strangely slowed, poetry-trained senses, I read much better, and I taste before I swallow. I'm so grateful to the writers I know for hauling me into the 21st Century. It's really a beautiful, beautiful place. I used to think the beauty all died sometime at the beginning of the 20th Century. But it didn't really. Thank you, all of you. xoxoxo

What does he mean, eccentric? Dale, aka Mole, what do you mean, eccentric? I am going to assume he means for doing that odd thing, writing both poetry and fiction, and nothing else, unless he says otherwise.

If you would like to read a poem by Dale Favier, you might go here, where you can also buy his Opening the World from Pindrop Press. I did, and I recommend it! He also has a collaborative book called Not Coming Back with photographer Nina Tovish, and you can read and see samples of poems and images here. I still need to get that one. You can also read poems and musing on his website. Here's a sample post; in this one he reminds me of Thoreau (one of his "like-minded people," surely), especially in the opening declaration:

I regret nothing except my occasional half-hearted gestures towards making myself acceptable. There was a time when I thought might find a home among like-minded people: I'm grateful to them for making clear that it will never happen, and so keeping me from wasting my time. There is so little time. My awareness of that deepens every day. No: you can take me as you find me, and that will usually be gazing at the sky, while points of rain or starlight patter on my threadbare scalp. The riddle is written up there, and I stop and puzzle out a few phrases, and wait for the lightning or the sunrise. And still the sphere turns, and turns, and turns in its faint wash of darkness. There is nothing else, not really. We are traveling at immense speed, even in simple terms of the earthbound physics Newton propounded: we are falling toward the sun at somewhat more than 67,000 miles per hour. Once you actually absorb that fact, the speeds at which we creep around our falling home take on a comic aspect. In the time it takes us to walk to the store we have also traveled ten thousand miles through space: yet the quarter mile's incidental movement on this blue-and-white marble's surface is the movement that impresses us. Well. Not so clever, for all our airs. No. Stars and rain are real, the silky hair threading between my fingers is real, the pulsing heart that lifts my fingertips is real. The rest? Toiling from speck to adjacent speck on a marble that's been thrown off a cliff? No: not so real. Not so real at all.

There you go. You may find him surprisingly like-minded at times--or you may find him fascinating because he is not. Meet the man, the Mole, the poet... And thank you, Dale! 

Mole surveys Thaliad

A hand out in thanks to poet Dale Favier--
vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

To have a thoughtful poet linger over Thaliad is a privilege, and that's what I am lucky enough to have in Dale Favier. "Zodiacs," a third installment of his musings is up at the Mole's burrow. Clearly he intends more, and I am grateful to him.

1. Thaliad
2. Thaliad: Upside Down From Us
3. Zodiacs

Elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See tabs above for more.

A marketer and a poet weigh in--

"Building community one stanza at a time"

Despite the rumor that I loll all day in my golden bubble, dreaming and eating bon-bons, that bright imagination man Gary Dietz has included me in one of his 6by7 Reports as an example of a writer adapting to the changing world of publishing. Though I am sure he has been extra kind here, I am curious to see how writers in general and I in particular appear through his marketer's lens.

Here's a clip from the piece: "On her blog, amidst the wonderful discussions of her and others’ work you will find some of the best discussion and perspective of marketing challenges you can read from the persona of a successfully published writer in the midst of major changes in the markets." There's more, interesting to anyone who cares about the vagaries of publishing and the adaptation of writers.

Because I don't think of building a seaworthy craft of "readership" in quite this analytical way, I find it especially challenging. Writers area always interested in the gaps between one view and another, and here's one related to me and what I do. I can no doubt learn from it.

Mole continues looking at Thaliad

Poet Dale Favier has lodged a second installment in his thoughtful series on my epic adventure in verse, Thaliad, this time about a major loss in Chapter IV that shades the entire poem and the changes in Thalia. (His first post was a lovely introduction to what he called "a rapidly running, easy-to-follow narrative poem.")

I won't cut into what he has to say about "Gabriel the Weeper"; please take a look for yourself and see what you think. One small thing I especially like about this post--he's the first commentator to point out that the small, additional voice in the header glosses is different from the rest of the poem. I certainly meant it to have the feel of a later addition.

He ends with this sharp-tipped thought: "The deepest kinship of this epic, formal, emotional, and moral, is with the Aeneid. There comes a time, reading that poem, that an acute reader suddenly realizes that Augustus Caesar was sold a bill of goods, and that Virgil, despite all his show of politically correct patriotism, was not really sure that Rome should ever have been founded at all. A similar dismay and foreboding runs through the Thaliad: its beauty is wounded and dark, from beginning to end."

P. S. A thanks is due writer and seminary prof Wesley Hill

for re-posting a portion of my Athanasius (etc.) post in his tumblr log, Writing in the Dust. I've been glad to see a stream of readers coming from there logged in my stats. Thanks, Wes!

Dale Favier (re)reads Thaliad

I'm always interested when poet Dale Favier a.k.a. Mole posts on books because he is meditative and his thoughts shoot off in interesting, often curious directions. He has begun what appears to be a series of posts on Thaliad--as he did, earlier, on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. (The easiest way to read all his Orphanage comments at once may be to go to Amazon, where they are gathered in one fat bundle in customer reviews. I am grateful to him for posting them on his blog and Amazon.) Here's a clip from the first Thaliad post:

I hope readers will not be put off by a modern poem being called an epic. “Epic” has come to mean “gargantuan” or “undisciplined”: it's used of great sprawling things, and, particularly in modern poetry, of monstrously fleshy lyric poems stuffed with obscure allusions, and no narrative skeleton to hold them up: things like Pound's Cantos get called “epics.” It leaves us no name for the Thaliad, which really is an epic: a rapidly running, easy-to-follow narrative poem. Those who don't like poetry can ignore the fact that the right margin is ragged, and read it as a quick short utopian/dystopian novel.

In any case, my response to finishing this poem was – as I know it has been for others – to turn immediately to the front, and begin to read it again. Epic is always an attempt to find origins, isn't it?

For more about Thaliad, you may visit the Phoenicia Publishing page about the book, read a sample at Scribd, visit my Thaliad page, or read customer reviews at Amazon.com or Amazon.uk (the reviews differ on the two sites, and I'm pleased to already have six when so many poetry books never have any at all.) Note: The best way to obtain a hardcover is to go to the Phoenicia page. Also, if you want a peep at some of the gorgeous vignettes made for the book by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, you may peep at some of them here, or else see some of the process here.

Mole notes

Poet Dale Favier has been reading A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and making notes about it as he goes on his blog, mole.  Now he has put all the comments together as a lovely fat Amazon note. I enjoyed reading it very much!

Mole & Pip

Thanks to Dale Favier for continuing to meditate on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage on his blog as he moves through the book. I liked what he had to say from the start, as in his contrast with Faulkner--that in the book fullness, not emptiness is behind all things. His blog, mole, is wonderfully full of what Melville called deep diving and new poems. His latest Pip comment: It takes a long slow weary time to become human, for some of us. I preach the Church of the Bitter End and the news of your guilt, boy. I'm loving Marly's White Camelia: the story of Pip's slow coming-to-humanity cuts close to the bone, for me. 

Camellia courtesy

Thanks to Oregon poet Dale Favier for his mid-way read and post, in which he has a number of interesting things to say, including this: "People will inevitably call it Faulknerian – it's Deep South, it's hot, it's told through the lens of a boy who's neurologically atypical. And it's got fruit and blood. But if you have any spiritual antennae at all, you'll quickly grasp that it's anti-Faulkner. There's fullness, not emptiness, in back of everything." That comment reminded me of how my father, the sharecropper's boy who became a WWII tail gunner and then a professor of analytical chemistry, detested the very name of Faulkner and thought that he had gotten the deep South and poverty entirely wrong.

Thanks to GalleyCat for "handpicking" A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and posting a clip and jacket image... and to poet Robbi Nester for telling me about it.

Thanks to the Cooperstown Crier for news about the new book and also about the NBA panel for young people's literature.

Upcoming:  an expansion of readings in North Carolina, tba on the Events page.

Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall, no. 2

Another piece of the launch interview for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage can be found--it's going to be a bit like a scavenger hunt--at Mole's burrow. Dale Favier asked me an interesting question about the origin of the novel and the Depression, and I have responded with a basket of family eels, slippery bits of stories and mysteries (illegitimacy, runaways, Southern racial mixing) that intrigued me as a child and young woman. Still do.

Many thanks to Dale Favier, who has recently published a collection of poetry, Opening the World, with Pindrop Press in the UK. (If you are a blogger and want to ask a question and host Q and A plus some information--or else host a short excerpt and information--please write me at smaragdineknot [at] gmail.com.)

Part one of the interview and comments can be found at Hannah Stephenson's The Storialist.  Comments off--please comment on Dale's blog or facebook site.

Sampling Dale Favier's "Opening the World"

The cover features an oil-on-panel by Robin Weiss.

In our sometimes prosaic world, poetry needs all the favors and luck it can get. I have been reading Dale Favier's Opening the World from Jo Hemmant's Pindrop Press. Mid-way, I announce: I like it; I recommend it. The other side of the coin says you might like it; you could buy it and find out.

Unlike many people he looks at the world from a particular angle; he has a stance and point of view. It's not mine, so I enjoy peering through his eyes--as, here:

DISTANCE

Full moon tonight,
pouring through seaglass.
Distance, some say,
is the garden of illusion;
but philosophers of sight
used to fret about why, if you press
an object to your eye,
you cannot see it. Some distance,
they concluded, is required.

Oh, don't cry, don't cry, dear.
The blundering stops
and so do we.
When the rattle of the world
fades away, and the stars
vanish into light, we will be
droplets on a high webstrand
spun between two branches.

And here I especially like the dream muddle of rain with snow, snow and blossom, rain and tears, sky and eyes--and the music of the thing:

THE RAIN YOU SENT

Darling,
the rain you sent was mixed with snow.
I could not tell which between
the snowflakes and the apple blossom
on the black sidewalk; I woke and you were

weeping on my chest. Your hair
and the snow and the apple blossom,
I could not tell which between
the sky and your eyes;
I dreamed that you were here.
I could not tell which between
the dream and the sky, the tears and your hair,
the sidewalk and the waking.
Darling,
the rain you sent was mixed with snow.

Now I think we need a poem to go with that snazzy-looking cover with birds. Here's Dale grabbing Crow as a subject. Watch out, Ted Hughes! I especially like the demented pigeon, the crow-motion, Crow's philosophy, and the cowlick feathers. As in children's books about talking animals, we feel quite sure that we know these creatures as people, too.

CROW

Crow cocks his head for a swift, assessing look.
A quick grab and a prancing gallop
(skip to my Lou, skip to my Lou)
out of the traffic:
safe enough. He holds the captive burger bag
down with one foot and tears
with a strong black beak. Nothing.
Tears again, and again, till the bag is in tatters.
Nothing inside.

He's philosophical about it.
Some bags have stuff and some don't;
there's no way to know without ripping them up.
It's all in a crow's day's work. With a toss of his head
and a flirt of wings, he throws it aside, and the wind
takes it into the street again.

He takes time out to jeer at a pigeon
on general principles. His chest
swells up; he squints and bobs and he rasps
out the insults; it hurts your throat
just to look at it. Whatever you may think
of crows, they're willing to work. Anything
worth doing, says crows, is worth doing
forcibly.

Pigeon blinks and totters and starts and endless mutter
of excuses and extenuations. Crow's having none of it.
He takes to the air and pulls, wing-grip by wing-grip,
up to the telephone wires. Takes two deep breaths
and calls the pigeon some more choice names,
and then ignores it, majestically, while the pigeon
is still explaining that the thing is, it's not so,
I didn't mean, you can't just say, it's only, you know?

--whatever pigeon's say. Crow's on the lines,
swaying in the wind, above it all; the strong free air
ruffling his cowlicked feathers. It's good
to be alive.

Like these poems and want to help get the word out to readers? What can one do to help?

1. Tweet this post.

2. Do a tweet about the book.

3. Share via facebook--this post or your own--Google+, and such places.

4. Do a blog post. Or you may steal this post and re-post: be my guest.

5. Collar your friends and practice word of mouth.

6. Does your local library have a suggestion box? Drop one in!

7. Share the book on goodreads or similar sites.

And now I need to go read another of Dale's poems... You may find more of them at his blog, mole.

Marly Youmans's novel now in pre-order is A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Her 2011 book of poems is The Throne of Psyche.

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!

Plentitude

As I am rather busy today and have a husband leaving for Morocco tomorrow, I am glad that Dale Favier has done all the work of posting for me. Again today he has written a poem in response to The Throne of Psyche. How marvelous...

The illustration is the under drawing by Clive Hicks-Jenkins of "Touched," the image on the jacket of the hardcover of "The Throne of Psyche" and on the cover of the paperback. And I am touched! "Some poems insist that you write poems back," he says. I say that there is nothing more wonderful as a response to a collection than the engendering of new poems. Thank you, Dale!

Sweet blame

I am tickled to find that The Throne of Psyche has progeny.  Dale Favier is blaming me for his four new poems. The mythic Psyche gave birth to Hedone, Pleasure...