Poems at Mezzo Cammin

New at Mezzo Cammin: "A Curious Incident," a poem from the manuscript of The Book of the Red King; and "Rider Entering a Ruined City," a poem I wrote for painter and occasional penpal Graham Ward (UK.) Unfortunately, I cannot find an image of Graham's painting--thought I had saved it--but shall post later if I unearth one.

Traveling the Red King's lands

Graham Ward, "Child in Tarifa"
This "starved-brush" painting is one that inspired
one of my poems in the Red King manuscript,
"The Stellar Child."
Generation works both ways!
I've also written some poems
for Graham to use in a future gallery show.

I have a few more interesting questions in the Bullington-Youmans interview party but need to take a small break from them in order to push forward on The Book of the Red King, which has been hanging fire for years now. It has been in the condition of "almost" for so long that I was tempted to let it go on being "almost." Luckily, a shadowy sense of guilt at last crept over me, and I am now crawling through the very long manuscript again for the third time in the past month. And I think that I shall be done creeping along when I get to the end this time. I shall, that is, stop. Nothing is ever done, particularly on such a  very long manuscript of poems.

One of the curious things about this manuscript is that thirteen prints and paintings have been made in response to its poems, even though it is not yet out as a book--not even submitted. One of them is by Mary Bullington, and I've posted it several times before. Some came from a poem that has never ben submitted anywhere, written for a friend, who sent it into the aether. Eventually it landed in an artist's inbox and became a seed. What a surprise!  I've always thought that a work should, in the ideal, be generative. So this makes me feel pleased.

Quite a number of poems about the Red King and the Fool (and Amara the alchemist and many others) are online, but if you would like to see a group of them at once, you may find some at Mezzo Cammin and at At Length. Of course, I have fiddled with them since....

Collaborations with artists, 2012

A foliate head by Clive Hicks-Jenkins...

With painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and designer Andrew Wakelin of Wales:

Clive is giving me three foliate heads for division pages and painting a head for the cover of The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press), and Andrew will be working with us on book design.

With painter Graham Ward of England:

I'm writing poems for Graham's opening in June--and having lots of fun doing so and getting first peek at his new paintings.

With the English-born transplant to Ohio, composer-and-much-more Paul Digby, and his wife, painter Lynn Digby:

We'll be doing what appears to be a fairly ambitious collaborative project, but right now it's barely getting started. More on that one later. This one is a sort of outgrowth of Paul's curation, music composition, and paintings joined with work by Lynn Digby and four other painters in "Into the Light" at Anderson Creative (November, 2011)--at least, doing such a large collaborative project seems to have fired the desire to do another.

Also with Paul Digby:
Paul is going to be matching more of my poems with music and film. Five are already up at youtube.  Rather saintly of him, I think!

My Christmas card, 2011

Graham Ward, "Angel Entering a City"
Pilfered from Clive Hicks-Jenkins's Artlog--
thank you, Graham and Clive!


It is the last of Advent, and what a strange time it has been! Beautiful, lucky things have happened--heartfelt letters from writers I respect and homecomings and unforgettable hours.  My children are all in the nest, and we are five again.  One deeply sad thing has happened--a friend, self-slain--that reminds me of our great human hunger for love and mercy, now and always.

Today is Christmas Eve, and there is much to birth before the day is done. Greetings to you and a merry Christmas to you and wishes for that ever-desired love and mercy to follow you all the days of the coming year.

Attributions:  The painting by Graham Ward has already been shared by my friend Clive on his Artlog. I picked it in honor of the now-underway collaboration I'm doing with Graham, to be finished by June in time for an opening.  Original source for poem:  http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/11/16/i-heard-their-wings-like-the-sound-of-many-waters/#comments  Forthcoming in The Foliate Head (UK:  Stanza Press.) Thanks to editors Dave Bonta and Beth Adams for nominating the poem for a Pushcart Prize. Thanks to issue editors Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita for their long work of editing.


“I HEARD THEIR WINGS LIKE THE SOUND OF MANY WATERS”

In the dark, in the deeps of the night that are
Crevasses of a sea, I heard their wings.
I heard the trickling of tiny feathers
With their hairs out like milkweed parachutes
Floating idly on the summer air,
I heard the curl and splash, the thunderbolts
Of pinions, the rapids and rattle of shafts—
Heard Niagara sweep the barreled woman
And shove her under water for three days,
I heard a jar of fragrance spill its waves
As a lone figure poured out all she could,
Heard the sky’s bronze-colored raindrops scatter
On corrugated roofs and tops of wells,
I heard the water-devil whirligigs,
I heard an awesome silence when the wings
Held still, upright as flowers in a vase,
And when I turned to see why they had stilled,
Then what I saw was likenesses to star
Imprisoned in a form of marble flesh,
With a face like lightning-fires and aura
Trembling like a rainbow on the shoulders,
But all the else I saw was unlikeness
That bent me like a bow until my brow
Was pressed against the minerals of earth,
And when I gasped at air, I tasted gold.

Frolics and News

Graham Ward, "King of Finisterre,"

1.  My husband is back from Morocco and Egypt, trala, where he did have many curious adventures. And he has brought home interesting loot, of course. Curly shoes and bazaar jewelry and fezes (fezi? fezzes? fezzies? fuzzies?) and paintings on papyrus and chunks of indigo and shawls and so on.  Who knew that there was such a strange, sweet-smelling thing as papyrus oil? (Well, Egyptians, for one. No doubt.)
2.  I'm about to go sing in honor of Thanksgiving, lalala, so this will be short...
3.  I am now working with UK painter Graham Ward on a collaborative project, and it is proving to be fun. I have already written one piece for him (plus I had one that was finished earlier) and plan to do some more as he produces new paintings from now through spring. Ekphrastic revels. It will result in a little book accompanying his upcoming show.
4.  I have been so busy being a single mom for the past two weeks that I have not finished my second pass proofs for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Wah.  Must get on to that this evening, rather late. Time for the night-owl oil.
5.  Somebody posted a rather rotten blog post about one of my books last week (luckily The New York Times and Washington Post etc. were hot on it) and I made the marvelous discovery that I did  not mind, not even one little tiny whit of a whit. Somehow I must have outgrown feeling bad about such things somewhere in the last decade...
6.  Had Yolanda Sharpe (a painter friend) for Sunday afternoon dinner and once again can say that she is one of the most amusing people ever! She ought to be in a comic novel. (Wouldn't it be fun to write a comic novel?)
7. It's almost Thanksgiving.  So thanks for reading--I'm giving thanks for you, whoever and wherever you are!  Don't forget The Lydian Stones will begin on Tuesday. If you want to take a look at the design and put in your two cents of criticism, feel free.

The Angel from the Land of Sleep

"Angel Entering a City," Graham Ward.
Graham can be found at his blog and website.
 If you go to his blog, you can find out that he
was a Boy Dalek. If you go to his website,
you will find many wonderful pictures.

This morning I wrote a poem, "The Angel from the Land of Sleep and Dream Bestows a Gift." Nothing terribly unusual about writing a poem, of course; a certain number of slightly mad people do it all the time. But the part that I especially relished about this one is that I have not written a poem or story in my sleep for quite a while, and this time I woke up around six a.m. with the first three lines of a poem in my head and a very strong image in my head. (What is the word for writing in one's sleep? And if there is not a word, what should it be? Dormigraphia? Wrooze? Wrleep?)

Despite the fact that I am not a morning person, I leaped (not all that gracefully) out of bed and grabbed a pen and a piece of paper (which just happened to be a flyer advertising "Bach for Cello" with "David Gibson, cello" and "Dr. Bruce Harris, piano." I happen to know Dr. Harris, and he looks absolutely nothing like a piano. Nor does David Gibson resemble a cello, though he looks more like a cello than Dr. Harris looks like a piano.) I rushed into the next room, raised the blind a couple of inches, flipped over the flyer, and proceeded to write down the rest of the poem as it sluiced in from wherever poems sluice in-from. Delicious start to the day! No doubt I looked not like a cello or a piano but like a poor little mole who needed glasses. Or at least like a me who needed glasses. Which are now perched on my nose. Lucky for you, or this would be even more nonsensical than it is.

Here is the epigraph: Diary entry, 23 June 2011: Awakened by the image of a portrait in the style of Graham Ward, along with the first three lines of a poem. I wonder, if I tell him, will he paint it? Truth confessed: there is no diary. That's just a literary fol-de-lol. I don't have time to keep such a dawdly, lackadaisical thing as a diary. But now I am going off to write a letter to Graham Ward. Good-by!

Oops, back. Just remembered that I am not going to write a letter to Graham Ward because I am going to take a boy who had his middle school graduation last night to band practice. He's going to play for the high school graduation this weekend. Definitely farewell this time, and if anything in this post seems a little weird, chalk it up to the fact that not-morning people should not waken at six. Except in this case, they definitely should. And did. And so on, tra la!

With Paul Digby and "The Birthday Roses" on youtube

I promised a surprise to my facebook friends, and I promised it by midnight. I hope they'll forgive me for the slowness of uploads. I meant it as a bit of a salute to April Fool's Day, but the Day is tricksy and shook me into the 2nd.

So here's the Fool from my ongoing project, The Book of the Red King. And it's all thanks to the composing and photography and video-making of that lovely man, Paul Digby.

You may find the Fool at youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEfrItrLfPA/ or you may look down the right-hand panel of this page and see a smaller version there in the youtube section.

If you would like to see the text of the poem, it may be found at qarrtsiluni as part of Two Poems from the Plant Kingdom: http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/01/24/two-poems-from-the-plant-kingdom.

The illustration is of a painting by my penpal Graham Ward, "The King in Finisterre." I chose it in honor of the Fool's devotion to the Red King. Looking at Graham's fools and kings set me off in that direction once more back in October. I'd fooled with fools before, but never so much and so foolishly as in these past few months.

Thanks, Graham! Thanks, editors of qarrtsiluni! And most of all, thank you to Paul.

The Castle of Work

Upcoming: eight poems from the manuscript I began in mid-October, The Book of the Red King, will soon be out in Mezzo Cammin; three more will be out in The Flea; and one in qarrtsiluni, along with a poem called "Wielding the Tree Finder." These are the only poems I've sent out from the manuscript, and they were all accepted at first submission, so I'm pleased about that--I am liking this mad dance between the Red King and the Fool, and I'm glad other people do as well.

Pub date for The Throne of Psyche turns out to be April (Mercer University Press). Galleys are in. The interior has tiny leaves (as well as big leaves of paper) that sprinkle down from the painting detail on the cover (by Clive Hicks-Jenkins). I'll wait to post that image.

Writing plans for January: write more Red King poems; reread A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (just accepted by Mercer); check to see if it is just the way I want it; tinker with part one of the 3-in-1 novel I wrote for my youngest and then send it out by the end of the month (maybe); start reading the manuscripts of other forthcoming books, not because I must but because I am obsessive.; do some collaboration with Graham Ward; send out some poems. Graham Ward's painting, "Angel Entering a City" is the image at post top, and you can see more of Graham at here.

*

These next few years will be busy. In rather short order, I shall go from the author of seven books to the author of thirteen--four books of poetry, seven novels, two Southern fantasies. Only two of my seven books are in print right now, the Godine hardcover of Little Jordan, my very first book here and the most recent P. S. Publishing book, Val/Orson, here (search on my name), available as a hardcover with or without jacket. My LSU poetry book and my four Farrar, Straus & Giroux books are at the mercy of the used book market, and now and then I notice people posting something about one or another. I hope that my new books can find their way to their readers, even in an world captured by the commercial.

Wishes: readers, maids, private secretaries! I won't get the second or third, but I hope for the first, as always. Sending-wish: I hope you have good wishes granted and that no birds fall from your private sky.

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: Graham Ward

Merry Christmas, one and all--light and birth to you in winter.

As it is no doubt a day of much-to-do for most people, I am simply giving two links to the world of marvelous Graham Ward. The image is his electronic Christmas card, which I have pilfered from my email to pay him homage.

I met Graham through painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and we're planning a collaboration in the new year. His paintings have great sensitivity and charm, as does he!

One of his images jogged my memory back in the latter half of October--I went back to the Red King, about whom I had written a story published in Postscripts (UK) and began writing poems about him and the figure of the Fool, who has a place in Graham's work. Every now and then I get--receive? am given?--a sluice of new poems, but never have I gotten one like this. As of 2:00 a.m. this morning, I have written 66 new poems about these and other figures, all set in a world of their own. Who knows how many I will keep, but it is a delicious run of new work. It was Graham who made my mind turn to these figures, and so I am grateful for that impetus!

You may look at Graham's paintings and other work here. And you may read his words here. His self-description: Graham Ward was born in Bradford, West Yorks, and grew up in Sussex. He studied Fine Art in Manchester and Stoke, and is a painter and illustrator. He has been an archivist, bookseller and librarian for the past thirty years, and his specialist field of interest is British art of the 20th century, He has twice walked the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain, and plans to undertake the Portugese route from Porto. He is currently operating a small cafe in Broadstairs after an abortive stint as archivist for the Dreamland Project in Margate.

He does not mention that he is working on a book about the walk to Santiago de Compostela, but you can find out about that and more via his blog.

Merry Christmas, one, and Merry Christmas, all! Light and birth to you in darkest winter.