Bontasaurus poetry assemblage & more

Dave Bonta's second annual list of poetry books of the year is up, each chosen by a different writer:

Just like last year, I thought I’d put out a call to poetry readers to contribute to a favorite poetry books list that doesn’t pay much heed to critical fashions or even date of publication. I asked people to try to select a single favorite book, which I realize is a tough assignment… and not quite everybody managed it. (I allowed a few reviewers to sneak in a second book, as you’ll see.) Unlike last year, I forgot to do this earlier in December so people could use the list for holiday shopping purposes. Oh well. Poetry books do make great Valentine’s Day gifts! And the responses I got are, I think you’ll agree, wonderfully varied, personal and eccentric. Thanks to everyone who took part. —Dave

Take a look! My choice was Susan Hankla's Clinch River, which I reviewed for The Hollins Critic.

* * *

29 December, the fifth day of Christmas

And Gary talked about Thaliad...
What fun!

I'm adding an assemblage-update: I'm realio-and-trulio touched by the wonderful Gary Dietz putting me in his personal pantheon here. Gary is an all-around interesting person and a wonderful single father who has surmounted more challenges than most people ever face I'm putting a link here because I'm pleased by his tribute but also because it feels immodest to say so, and most of the people who will read this post have already passed by. So I suppose I'm hiding it in plain sight in order to say thank you, Gary--what a sweet man.

*

When I woke, I was having such an obvious, complex dream about the state of arts culture and my own minor place in the hierarchy of that world that I'm still bemused. Talk about symbolic! It involved being in a large Checker cab with a bunch of male writers (including Bob Dylan) and no back door. I had that horrible dream sensation of forgetting something--in this case, my manuscripts to read--but was rescued by sending out a mental call for a very large bird to fetch them.

Lady Word of Mouth

New at Lady Word of Mouth:

MaryAnn Corbett, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter

poetry

Gary Dietz, Dads of Disability

essays, memoir, and a smattering of poetry

and a new edition of 

Scott G. F. Bailey's The Astrologer

novel

New book on fathers and disabled children--

Dads of Disability--"stories for, by, and about fathers of children who experience disability (and the women who love them!)" by Gary Dietz is up at Lady Word of Mouth. It's not just a book for fathers of disabled children but a book for all of us who live in a world that contains fathers and children.

Poems in the scales, 2013: two contests

www.kelsaybooks.com

While my 2013 bouts of judging were not so arduous as the prior year's National Book Award stint (316 books plus rereads), they were illuminating. This time it was poetry in the scales.  For the Alrich Award I read a winnowed group and chose a winner and two finalists. I found all five to be interesting reads, and that's an encouraging thing for poetry!

Winner 2013 Aldrich Press Poetry Award 

Overtipping the Ferryman, R. G. Evans 

Judge’s statement 

While reading for the Aldrich Poetry Award, I tripped and fell into the world of a skeptic obsessed with what he doubts—who takes the symbols and stories of creation and wrests them to his own uses, though God and the skeletons under our skin are never far away, and lend power and support to his poems. The collection by R. G. Evans has the virtues of energy, largeness of subject, strong narrative, and humor that begins with the double meaning of the title, Overtipping the Ferryman. He surprises us in story and in metaphor, giving us the child who leaps from her crib like a toad, the man plunging beneath the sea like a bone anchor, the forked lightning of a woman’s body, the fusing of plucked music and apple. Wandering in his harsh, lively world, we may desire more hours, more life. But in that realm, spiky thistles and flowers of gall blossom along his path, that “seam between belief and what I know is true.”

 Finalists
 Marion Considers the Cello, Annabelle Moseley
 The View From Here, Sally Cook

Honorable Mention
A Lack of Sound, Cynthia Neely
The Ways I Lost You,  Rosalie Sanara Petrouske
Small Chimes, Julie Brooks Barbour
Before There Were Barbies, Lianne Spidel
Poetry With a Vengeance, Russell Bittner

All finalists and honorable mentions were offered a standard contract for publication by Aldrich Press. The winner receives a monetary award and 50 copies.

I did know one of the finalists, having been on a panel with her and owning one of her books, but I recognized none of the writers that I read, and the names had been removed from the manuscripts.

Dads of Disability

Alexander Dietz

The other contest I judged his year was for a forthcoming anthology (mostly essays) that will also include some fictions and poetry. Gary Dietz's 2014 anthology, Dads of Disability:  Stories For, By, and About Fathers of Children That Experience Disability (and the Women Who Love Them), offered $75. and publication to four poets, parents of disabled children. With this one, parents who were long-practicing poets had an advantage, and it is surprising how many of us know what it is to raise a child who is very different from other children. 

I found this one hard to judge in one way; many of the poems were heartrending, and I wanted to give all the parents who submitted poems about their disabled children a prize. All the poems were spilling over with news of ordinary grace and painful truth. There is no proper response to such heartfelt work except gratitude for the parent who sees his disabled child through the eyes of mercy and witnesses his or her love to the world. Thank you to all the parents who submitted poems.

In ABC order:

Patricia Wallace Jones, "Adapted Views and Inveterate" 

John C. Mannone, "The iPod" 

Robbi Nester, "Letter To My Son"

Sam Smith, "The Prosthetic Fitting Suite"

Through this book, long-time single dad Gary combines his love of Alexander (a child with an interstitial deletion of the lower arm of chromosome 13) with his experience in marketing and interest in writing. I hope you will support the book and give or suggest it to people you know who care about the subject--or who might do so, given such a book! 

Kickstarter for special fathers and families--

Gary Dietz's Kickstarter project focused on very special fathers--those parenting children who are disabled in some way--still needs more backers. Please go here to take a look.

And if you're a poet or an essayist or a parent with a good story related to the topic, why don't you read the anthology plans? I'll be winnowing poems for Gary later in the year...

Kickstarter projects by friends

Gary Dietz 

"A book of stories for, by, and about fathers of children that experience disability. (And the women who love them.)" This one is a very worthy project that has not yet reached its goal. Please share with anyone who might be concerned with the topic! And if you are lucky enough that this issue has not touched you or your family, think about dropping a few dollars in the kitty.

I am choosing a few poems for the book as well. See here for more information on the associated poetry contest.

Ruth Sanderson 

"The book will span my career as an illustrator and fine artist, reproducing both published and previously unpublished paintings, as well as showing my process.."

James Artimus Owen 

"The 20th Anniversary Nearly Complete Essential Starchild"

Makoto Fujimura 

The Golden Sea.

This one is over, and I'm looking forward to receiving the book!

A story and a call for poems--

Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength. --Christopher Reeves

An image from the in-progress Kickstarter film

Long, long ago I was a teacher. One of my students was Gary Dietz, young and lively--I remember he backpacked around Japan in that long ago and came back to us with wonderful stories of the people, encounters on the street and in noodle shops. He's still lively, and has been on a great, demanding adventure since then, for in 1999 his son Alexander was born with an extremely rare "interstitial deletion of the lower arm of chromosome 13." A single dad for most of his life with Alexander, Gary found few helpful accounts of how to father children with disabilities, and now he is working on a blog and a book of essays by or about fathers with disabled children.

As part of his work for the book, Gary Dietz is calling for submissions of poems--a poetry contest. A minimum of four winning poems will appear in his Dads of Disability book, now in progress. Read guidelines and about compensation here.

What must the poem be about? The poem must be about, evoke, or directly evidence a theme about disability from the perspective of or a topic surrounding a father of a child (a young child or adult child or deceased child) who experienced some type — any type — of disability. The disability could have been physical, developmental, genetic, acquired, or learning. The topic could even be about some issues that some communities don’t consider a disability, such as being a Deaf person or having Autism (or being Autistic as some prefer). The poem can be by a male or female or straight or gay author as long as its main theme or themes concern a father of a child with a disability.

Alexander as a baby

Many of us in the arts have raised or are raising a child who presents special challenges because of some genetic inheritance or later accident; some have written about these demands in poems. Many parents with a disabled child wouldn't call themselves poets, yet commit the occasional poem. I am pleased to support Gary's project by reading and choosing poems for his upcoming book, and I hope that you will send a poem if you have something that fits the guidelines. If not, maybe the content will inspire you to write a new one. You don't have to be the father of a disabled child to do so--take a look at those guidelines!

And please consider making a donation when his Kickstarter fundraiser goes live. Many projects are called worthy. This one is--not only worthy but one that fills a need.

Take a look at Gary Dietz's Dads of Disability website here. (And yes, there will be a chance to submit essays as well.)

• Gary Dietz twitter feed @garymdietz 
• Gary Dietz facebook page (most posts public) https://www.facebook.com/gmdietz/

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!

"Pomes Penyeach" *

And doesn't The Throne of Psyche look pretty lying there?

Want to read more, to lodge a vote for my work and my publisher by claiming one for your own? The peddler's sack is here.

*Post title borrowed from James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

No wonder he signed himself "James Joyce."

Below is a little gift for you--a rather strange gift. Earlier I linked to Paul Digby's video of the poem; it can be found on youtube. Links to prezi and video versions of poems (by Gary Dietz and Paul Digby) from The Throne of Psyche, review clips, and blurbs can be found on my website.  

***
Originally published in Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Reprinted in The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011).

THE NESTING DOLL                                                        

Once upon a time a little doll

Encountered demons in the woods near home.

One took the guise of well-bred traveler,

Smiling and chatting as he touched her here

And there, at last worming into her mouth

By cunning sleights so he could taste her soul.

At first the demon could not find the soul,

And he was roiling-wroth against the doll,

Sending her vomit, scalding her small mouth

With curses; Mama turned her out from home,

And Papa yodeled, “She won’t bunk down here

But take her thwacks and be a traveler.”

How cruel to make a child a traveler,

A ditch her nest! The black night of her soul

Expelled a single star; the demon could hear

It crackle, plunging like the tears the doll

Had shed when she looked back at Home Sweet Home.

Wrinkles were rock around her papa’s mouth.

The demon snatched the starlight in his mouth—

Then grief was in him like the traveler

They call the Wandering Jew, who has no home

And cannot die. The fiery drop of soul

Explored his throat and gut; meanwhile the doll

Kept dreaming that some girl would beg, “Stop here.”

Nobody did. The demon still could hear

Her words; in pools he must have glimpsed her mouth

Bewailing fate, although it seemed the doll

Was rubbish to him now, the traveler

Less than the tiny prisoned flame of soul

That made his mazy heart a hearth and home.

A demon’s heart is a queer sort of home . . .

Yet the star burned as brightly there as here

Or any place and had not changed from soul.

At times it whisked up to the demon’s mouth.

Perhaps light sought to reach the traveler

And knew when demon yielded to the doll.

When home was starlight singing in her mouth,

All powers burned to hear the traveler

And marveled soul was nested in a doll.  

A Prezified poem--

Gary Dietz, a former student from eons ago when I had a brief incarnation as teacher has put one of my poems into Prezi. Go see the results. I'll turn off comments--give him any, please!

The House of Words: the Annex

June 12, I amend my life:
I have been rather naughty
and shown Gary Dietz in playful moments:
this is actually what he looks like.
He rarely looks as he did
in the "Attack of the Killer Inbox"
photo or the button-eye "Elluminate"
photo. Rarely. Honest.
Those of you who came by earlier
were dratted lucky to see them.

I am fresh back from the West Chester poetry conference (more about that later, when I am genuinely "fresh") and thinking about The House of Words again. This time I'm linking to an article by my former student Gary Dietz (the era when I taught is so very long ago that he is quite, quite grown up, a sparkling outside-the-box marketer and a marvelous single dad of Alexander) on his 6by7reports.com. As you can see from the photographs pilfered from his facebook page, Gary has not lost his sense of fun. So take a giant step over there to read his "Middleman be gone!" article.

If you have been following The House of Words, you may be rather amused by his summation of it! And he has a challenge for those of us making art in the 21st century...