Rerun: 4 Digby video poems from The Throne of Psyche

Mercer University Press, 2011,
in hardcover or paperback
Cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt

Carving pumpkins, herding cats and progeny, writing some tight small poems in a pause mid-novel: I've been empty of blog posts somehow, so please take this little homage to and appreciation of Paul as an apology. More anon.

Videos by UK-born Paul Digby, composer, videographer, singer, fine cabinet-maker, painter, knitwear designer, computer genius, and more. There is nothing this man cannot do! Or so I suspect. He writes lovely music, but evidently that's not enough for him--he has to put the rest of us to shame in innumerable categories of creation with his apparent belief that he is a human being and so can do things! He lives in an obscure corner of Ohio. I can't imagine what they can do to deserve him.

This one is a riposte to Billy Collins, for writing a poem about taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes, a thing that is forbidden!



And this one is about the sad adventures of a nesting doll. It's a harsh, cruel world out there, full of unexpected powers.



Here is where I let it all hang out about being a Southerner in the bitter, snowy, lakeside winters of upstate New York. Do I always feel like this? Of course not! Snow is magical.



And this poem I wrote when my eldest child had meningitis--about the strong, sudden knowing that he would live, when things were at their worst.

A Throne in April

April is poetry month: I've already posted about special April sales for The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, and now the second printing is out of print) and Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing), and thought that I should add a post for The Throne of Psyche, still in print in both hardcover and paperback from Mercer University Press. Both versions are handsome books; the hardcover won an Abby design award for Mary-Frances Glover Burt and the company of Burt and Burt. The cover image on both hardcover and paperback is by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

At various times I've posted copies of poems, and so here's a little batch of samples from the book. The collection runs to more than a hundred pages, so this is just a snip:

The Marriage Bed, 

originally published in Mezzo Cammin,

from the title poem

*

A Fire in Ice (riposte to Billy Collins)

originally published in The Raintown Review

*

Southern to the Bone

originally published in storySouth

*

Here We Go Round

originally in Mezzo Cammin

At Cullowhee

originally in The HyperTexts

*

Snow White in Wildwood

originally in Mezzo Cammin

*

and three little poems for my three children:

Tears of a Boy, Age Six

originally in Books and Culture

A Child at the Tropic Pavilions

originally in Mythic Passages

In Extremis

originally in storySouth

Poetry on video by Paul Digby,

including In Extremis and A Fire in Ice

Good wuthering

I'm very glad to have landed a spot on Amateur Reader's Wuthering Expectations end-of-year lists because I love that site. If I had all the time in the world to read blog posts, I would never  miss a post of that one. Here's the quote from the "Best of the Best" section The Wuthering Expectation Best Books of 2015 - the noodles they make for me:

Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman; Little, Big, John Crowley; Life Is a Dream, Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Germinal, Émile Zola. The confusion of the two dinners at the end of the first act of Richard Bean’s and Carlo Goldoni’s One Man, Two Guvnors; Rosso Malpelo digging for his buried father in Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo”; Richard Jefferies falling in love with a trout; Mark Twain getting his watch fixed; John Davidson on the beach with his dogs; Lizzie Eustace trying to memorize Shelley in The Eustace Diamonds; the scene in Marly Youmans’s Thaliad where the little kids in the van drive away from the little boy – no, even better, when they go back for him; and the end of “All at One Point” in Calvino’s Cosmicomics when Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 creates the universe in an act of generosity – “Boys, the noodles I would make for you!” – which may perhaps be an allegory for what all of these writers were doing for me this year.

I also love this and am so amused because my friend Paul Digby has mock-reproached me (for three years!) about what happens to Gabriel in Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) This despite the fact that some of Fr. Augustine Wetta's students at the St. Louis Priory School gave Gabriel some fanfiction-style adventures of his own...

You can find Amateur Reader on twitter (@AmateurReader) as well. He's worth a follow. And Paul? He's the lovely fellow who has made videos for some of my poems, which you can find here:

Follow Marly's board Digby videos: videos by composer-videographer Paul Digby for poetry by Marly Youmans on Pinterest.

You can also find some recordings of Paul singing at the same Pinterest account.

Related:

• Maze of Blood at Favorite Books of 2015, "Books and Culture Magazine."
• Glimmerglass at Books for Christmas: the Headmaster Recommends, The Imaginative Conservative.
• Excerpt from Thaliad at quarrtsiluni (with Gabriel)
• Another excerpt from Thaliad at Mezzo Cammin (the final poem on the page)

NPM5: I give you sphinx and snow cats--

April, national poetry month, no. 5

Here's one I may have posted before--certainly I have posted Paul Digby's video of the poem earlier. It's an iambic tetrameter poem in couplets, so it resolutely rejoices in rhythm and rhyme. I thought of this one because I read it at the Fenimore Art Museum on Monday, and somehow people always think it very funny that a poem should reprove a popular poet for removing Emily Dickinson's clothes. All those tiny buttons...

The poem appeared in TheThrone of Psyche (Mercer, 2011), available in hardcover and paperback. Both have a cover drawn from a detail of a Clive Hicks-Jenkins painting, and beautiful design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt. It was originally published in an issue of Raintown Review guest edited by Joseph Salemi.

***

FIRE IN ICE
A riposte to Billy Collins, “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” 


Don’t think because her words are wild
That Dickinson’s a sylphine child

For your undressings—don’t rend the haze
Of veils that shields you from her blaze.

Her hands are capable and know
The ways of burning—how sparks blow

When flames are jostled by a bold
Adept, her fingers tipped with cold.

And though in after-hours she threads
The dew she plucks from spiderwebs,

Or answers Who? to midnight’s owls,
Or strokes the cats, returned from prowls—

Or takes to skipping to and fro
With moonlit maidens made of snow,

She’ll freeze, inviolate and meek,
If you so much as try to speak.

Shove off—avoid those brazen wings:
She’s not for your unbuttonings.

The polished stone above her head
Declares her state among the dead:

Here waits that sphinx whose secret power
In riddles found her finest flower.

***

Here is Paul Digby's video of the poem. You may find seven of his videos of my poems here.

The Flower Girl

THE FLOWER GIRL

with many thanks to Paul Digby

  

 Here's a not-much-more than newborn poem from me, embodied in an even newer video by the wonderful Paul Digby. It's a blank verse poem, tying off with a rhyme, and looks to be the first of a group--at least, I have already written a related poem and have some scattered flecks of thought about a few more.

Paul reads the poem, and he made the video. He is one of the most creative people I know--a composer, a videographer, a carpenter, a painter in oils, a knitter and designer, a custom frame maker, and endlessly on. Lately he has been singing a great deal. He's a special person, and I appreciate the many kind things he has done for my poems. You can see six more of his videos of my poems here.

P. S. I agree with Marja-Leena, the other one didn't deserve to be on the same page! So I took it down... Shall post it on Facebook for the curious.

Next up: reading at The Village Library of Cooperstown. And a pail of snow. So wash your face in crystal...

Just 'cause: end-of-November ice. And slippery snow. And snowmen. Because Yankeedom in winter. Because fire. Because cats. Because poetry. Because Emily. Also Paul Tree (leafy Facebook alias) aka Paul Digby, who made this. (And because nobody should be allowed to take off Emily Dickinson's clothes.)

* * * * *

Comments and review clips HERE

Reading from Glimmerglass, 

Q and A afterward...

Nights at the Round Table series

Village Library of Cooperstown

Cooperstown New York

3 December 2014

Wednesday

7:00 p.m.

I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who have the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Glimmerglass does more than shimmer and grip; it entertains and hypnotizes. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty. Whether she’s writing historical fiction or fantasy, her characters leave one breathless. Her ability to describe a person, a place, or the psychological underpinnings of a plot or individual, ranks with the great novelists, the highest literature. A tale of love and intrigue, mystery and pathology, Glimmerglass’ appeal is the warmth and charge of a tale told round a fire fused by Hitchcockian anxiety, empathy, and relief. Nature, architecture, dread, thrill, sexual dilemma, and murder echo against Youmans’ gorgeous prose and terrifying romance, which glides like a serpent―without a single extraneous or boring word. Youmans is my favorite storyteller. I come back to her as if to a holy well.  --Jeffery Beam, award-winning poet of The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, and many more books

"The Wish for Roses," again--

This evening Paul Digby posted a link to his video for "The Wish for Roses," and though I've already shared his rendition elsewhere, I think it ought to be here as well. Thanks to those who have shared the poem on facebook, and to commenters on various pages... I've seen it on six pages already, so hope it is sailing out into the world.

The poem originally appeared at Sienna Latham's wonderful Hindsight, where it was joined with the original photograph and an account by Fredric Koeppel of his great-aunt Hazel Tuttle. I'm so glad that he wrote her story and posted!

An earlier reading of the poem appeared from librarykris of New Zealand at Audioboo at the beginning of the year--so lovely to hear different interpretations of a poem. Kris also recorded my poem "Sixteen Hundred Years."

Yo ho for O-hi-o

photo by Paul Digby, July 2014

I had a wonderful time teaching at the Antioch workshops, and then promptly sailed off to Alliance, where I stayed for some days with painter Lynn Digby and composer (and more, as he does everything, I begin to think) Paul Digby. And I had a marvelous time there as well--lots of talk and frolic in their exceptionally lovely garden.

Paul recorded and filmed me reading bits of Glimmerglass, Thaliad, and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. He also made recordings of me reading poems from The Foliate Head, the some-day-to-be The Book of the Red King, and some other uncollected poems, including one that will be out in Sienna Latham's Hindsight in September, timed to match the appearance of Glimmerglass, now available as a pre-order. So now Paul is busy writing music, it seems...

Blog hop, bog hlop for Richelle Hawkes

Now in pre-order
Available via Mercer, online shops,
and your favorite indie bookstore

Richelle Hawks of Shipwreck Dandy asked me to participate in her blog hop, and so here goes--

What am I working on?

Right now I have finished up a week at the Antioch Writing Workshops in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I ran a poetry workshop and also met one-on-one with various people to discuss both poetry and fiction manuscripts. It was great fun, and I met lots of wonderful people, and stayed with writers Robert Wexler and Rebecca Kuder. Now I’m staying with friends-in-the-arts Lynn and Paul Digby, and Paul is taping and filming me reading poems and some fiction. Later on he’ll make some videos (and there will be podcasts) with his own music.

When I go home, I need to finish up some manuscripts that have been lying around, waiting for attention.  I have a poetry manuscript and a novel for children that are in need of some final polish or tweaks here and there. I have a novel forthcoming next year that I mean to revise one more time—occurred to me that I really ought to change the order of a few things, long after it arrived at the publisher's office.

More here

I won’t start a large, new project until those things are done, though I’ll be writing poems and small stories. I’ll be doing some traveling on behalf of my  novel, Glimmerglass, beginning with SIBA in Norfolk in September. I really need to arrange more events at the moment. And I’m still doing some work to help out recent poetry and fiction books—The Throne of Psyche, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head. (See tabs above for information.)

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I write lyric poetry, long narrative poetry, short stories, novels of various sorts, and even a few Southern fantasies for young adults, so I find that one a daunting question. Think I’ll leave it for readers to answer!

Ferrol Sams Award,
Silver Award, ForeWord BOTYA
More here

Why do I create what I do?

One of the most beautiful, good, and true acts human beings can perform on planet Earth is to rejoice in the greater Creation by making things. To create art is to live a larger life, one with greater energy and joy and scope.  

I make things in order to speak to and give back to the created world—to make shapeliness and to seek power and truth in words that, once pushed into the right order, may become an experience for another human being. I love the thought that somewhere, someone may be reading one of my books and feel something of what I felt when I was making it.

How does my creative process work?

More here

I might as well say that it falls as a golden waterfall from a distant star. The more I go on, the less I know and the more I feel about the mystery of art. If my writing is moving in its most natural and most potent way (as opposed to my simply doodling with words because, say, I haven't written a poem in a while and want to do so), it simply pours through me like a wave of energy that becomes embodied in words. Words and stories and poems swoop in, and later on I polish them and play with them until they are right. 

All work falls short of the fire that burns in the mind, but approaching that original fever is a constant lure. I love that fay call from within (or perhaps from without?) and the attempt to answer back.

More here.

And who to tag for the Gob Holp, Ogh Bolp, Blog Hop?

Scott G. F. Bailey
Scott's blog hop response here

More to come...

Digby frolics

Last year with Paul and Lynn Digby
(Lynn is the photographer here)
in Cullowhee, North Carolina

Stayed up till 3:00 a.m. in Alliance, Ohio, talking to the man who made these:

In Extremis
The Birthday Roses
   from The Book of the Red King (yet to come!)
The Exile's Track
The Nesting Doll
A Fire in Ice

Most of those are from The Throne of Psyche.  Music and videography by the inimitable Paul Digby... Whee!

Music while writing--and while not writing--

follower of Hieronymus Bosch, "Concert in the egg."
Wikipedia Commons, from Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Q: What sort of music do you listen to while writing, and how does it vary? (The question is from Sienna Latham of the fascinating Hindsight, located at the intersection of art and museum on the web. Have a question of your very own? Leave on in comments.)

A: Perhaps I am a bit strange in this regard. I'm always seeing online playlists for writers--what they listened to while writing such-and-such a novel. But I have a great capacity for blotting out background noise (very useful when one has been raising three children, though one needs to have internal radar set for the "wrong" sort of noise, and also possess the ability to move back and forth between children and the depths of a manuscript) and so I never trouble myself with playing music. In fact, it seems strange to me to think of doing so.

What would I do it for? To me, it seems like the attempt to find a distraction when I neither need or want distraction, and I would tune it out anyway. But what do other people who don't blot sounds out want it for? Is it that one doesn't quite like writing and wants to be distracted to some degree? I'm always bemused by the many writers who claim to dislike writing and to love having written. (I don't think I would write if I felt that way. Should one admire people who write despite that feeling, or be troubled that they force themselves to do what they don't like?) Two of my children like music when they do homework... So is it to be amused? Is it to set a mood? Is it to let words ride on sound that "fits" the subject? To be "inspired"? Aside from the fact that I would block out the music anyway, I don't need mood or inspiration to be created by something outside myself. There's something I am missing, it seems. Writers are alike in some ways, different in others. I suppose this is a way I am different. (But I never think the particulars of how people write are significant.)

That said, I do sometimes find myself writing a poem after listening to music. Because music is an awakening force... and in me, it tends to wake up words.

What other part does music have in my life, then?

Some time ago I was shanghaied into the soprano section of a choir at the little Episcopal church that James Fenimore Cooper turned into a Gothic bandbox on his return from Europe. I have two or three practices per week and sing in public at least once a week. So I probably sing more than most people my age. The choir sings Haydn, Humperdinck (the real one), Bach, etc. I'm continually surprised to find myself in a choir (me?) and singing in public, and I have threatened to write a comic novel called Choir. In the time I've been singing, we've had quite a few people in the arts in the choir--painters Deborah Guertze, Yolanda Sharpe (a wonderful mezzo-soprano), and Ashley Norwood Cooper.

As for my life at home and on the road, I hear a good deal of music but not in any systematic way. The last CDs I bought for my fall book travels were Mike Scott and the Waterboys, An Appointment with Mr. Yeats, and also an anthology of songs made from Yeats poems.  Obviously that's because I have a Yeats mania. (I sometimes pick up other intersections between books and music, like the Tiger Lilies version of Edward Gorey--or, for that matter, as when composer-videographer Paul Digby sets one of my poems. See five videos of poems at youtube.) I don't bother with being "up to date," but my daughter makes me CDs of her favorite new music for book trips, and I listen to a lot of classical music--medieval and Renaissance music, along with Mozart, Britten, Taverner, etc.

Advice to would-be writers (for R. T.)

Another 2013 book tour picture--
in Cullowhee, NC with Paul and Lynn Digby--
Lynn behind the camera on this one...

 I've been trying to visit and support A Commonplace from Eastrod, the infant blog of R. T., but what a lot of events there are in Advent and before the school Christmas break! Tonight was the high school concert, where I immediately noticed that my youngest wasn't wearing his jeans under the school choir robes and that he had on some spectacular tie-dyed socks. Whee! It's hot under the lights and those big old choir robes...

R. T. aka Tim asks about advice for writers in his latest post, and that is a thing that changes each time one answers, so I thought that maybe it is time I answer that question once again; it's a question one often receives. So I'm going to muse on the e-page and find out what I think at the moment. I hope not to sound like a book-mad Mrs. Polonius. (Feel free to argue, add your own advice in the comments, etc.)

And here I am with painter Lynn Digby,
Paul behind the camera

Come back next year and I'll probably think something different. 

• Be a crazy, obsessed, wild reader at some time in your life, whether childhood or adulthood.
• If you have a tragedy in childhood or a difficult family, you don't have to be happy about it, but you have grit that may become a pearl. The world may not be your oyster, but you might be your own oyster, sooner or later.
• Don't worry about it if you are a woman and have children and can't meet the omnipresent "write every day" demand. 
• Your challenge is to make a thing that holds life in a net of words. This is almost impossible. There is no dishonor in failing, and even a failure may be transformative.
• Just be quiet and do the work. 
• Better yet, don't be a writer! (If you must, you'll do it anyway. And if you don't have to be one, this advice might save the world a lot of pedestrian books and some pernicious bestsellers.)
• And remember that worldly success is not the same thing as making something full of grace and truth. 
• If you believe in your innocence that worldly success must come, you may be destroyed by this belief. I have seen it happen to people, and such bitter change is tragic.
• Do not abuse the dead (particularly historical figures) in the creation of characters.
• The world owes you nothing. Do not expect something. But if it comes, say thank you.
• Listen to your teachers but later on show them that you can do the thing with flair that they said not (no, never!) to do.
• If what you want is worldly success and money, do something else entirely. It's a lot quicker and more sure.
• Read your novel/poem/story/thing-you-made aloud when you think you're done, particularly if you have what is known as a tin ear. Of course, nobody will tell you if you have a tin ear, so do it anyway.
• Grow bigger on the inside as you go along.
• And make your poems/narratives bigger on the inside as you go along.
• Don't apologize for your work.
• Forget about "finding yourself" or finding any other hard-to-pin-down quality. Just make the thing. You'll be making yourself, too.
• If you are a woman and a writer, do not think that you simply must be a superwoman. With hard work, it will be possible for you to do two large things well. (For me, that was first teaching and writing and later on raising three children and writing with a few events now and then on the side.) Be sure you choose the right things. This choice may be costly in a worldly way. Be clear on what you are about when you choose because regret in such situations can be strong.
• If you are a woman and choose to do more than two large things well, know that at least one of your pursuits will suffer. Make sure it is not your children, or you may be raising another generation of poets and writers. (That may happen anyway, but why tempt fate?)
• Do things you suspect you might not be able to do. 
• Push off the edge of the known world.

Book-tour-and-collaboration friends--

Marly with Nathan Ballingrud at Malaprop's. Photo by Paul Digby.

Here are a few of the promised pictures from the August book tour--one from my reading with Nathan Balingrud at Malaprop's in Asheville, and several with the Digbys in front of my family home in Cullowhee. My mother made a splendid lunch for us all.

Lynn Digby and Marly. Photo by Paul Digby.

Lynn and Paul drove all the way from Alliance, Ohio to go to the reading and meet in person. We ate at an Indian restaurant with Nathan and then moseyed over to Malaprop's. A great stop, especially reading with the hometown boy! 

Paul Digby and Marly. Photo by Lynn Digby.

I've been e-friends with composer (and more--what doesn't he do?) Paul and painter Lynn quite a while, and I'm grateful to Paul for the lovely youtube videos he has done (and will do) of my poems--so grateful that I dedicated Thaliad to him (and to one other who has also been a friend to my work, John Wilson.)

Paul, Lynn, and I are collaborating on a work called Requiem (well, my part I'm currently calling The Gold Requiem) that will culminate in a gallery show with paintings, music, and poems. I'm looking forward to more music and paintings!

Paul took a picture of his plate! The small empty one at left
was a cold, lemony eggplant salad with Indigo Rose tomatoes.
Here he has onion tart, fresh creamed corn, butter beans,
corn bread with cracklin', white acre peas, and okra and tomatoes.
Very Southern. And much from my mother's garden.

Is. Poetry. Dead. Redux.

Addendum: I'm a bit sick of reading is-poetry-dead and the-novel-is-dead articles. Journalists never tire of the topic. Tomorrow I think I'll write about something entirely different. Wombats. Ladybugs. Cat videos. Nobody ever seems to get tired of cat videos.

This morning I was reading a 2009 Sally Thomas column, Is Billy Collins Killing Poetry?  and wanted to leave a comment, but the comments were closed. I was not thinking about Billy Collins so much as about the survival of poetry and the need to pay attention beyond the poets thrust into our faces by--by whom? the so-called poetry establishment? by the fact that it's easier to keep repeating the same old names?

For the record, I do not think in the least that Billy Collins is killing poetry, even though I admit to having written a riposte to "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" that was published in The Raintown Review and later made into a video by that multi-media artist, Paul Digby. Eventually "A Fire in Ice" appeared in my collection The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011.)

Poetry survived the Dark Ages and the great vowel shift and one historical period clashing with another. It has even survived the tedium of the "authorless poem" and the enshrining of poetry in the ivory tower. It has survived mountains of terrible poems. It even survives all the people who claim they hate the stuff but haven't bothered to read enough to discover what's good out there.

What itched at me about the column had to do with the comments. Sally Thomas waxes enthusiastic over one of my favorite contemporary poets, the not-long-late Charles Causley, both his poems published for children and those not. I dearly love Causley and was glad to see her piping the news. A number of people left comments, and took the chance to bash Collins about the head a bit. But not one said, "Charles Causley. He sounds wonderful. I'll look him up." In fact, not one who wrote in even mentioned Causley.

Is it the same-old, same-old? Are people quite willing to talk over and over about how dreadful contemporary (academic! dull! pretentious! etcetera) poetry is--and some of the time, they are quite right--but not willing to explore somebody of beauty and joy and music and humor and depth like Causley? Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin rated Charles Causley very highly indeed, and they were both pretty demanding readers.

Plenty of interesting poets work quietly among us. Is it possible that some readers--even those who are writers--would rather disparage Collins (or Olds or Graham, or whoever their most-disliked "popular" poet is) than do some digging for poets they might like better?

On the web, Charles Causley is little seen because of copyright issues, but he is well worth seeking out. You might like him.

Most questions answered, no. 1

Paul Digby said... 
I'd like to see a post that discussed how your approach to writing might differ if there were no such things as publishing houses and ebooks and the like. How would you write for hand-bound limited edition stuff (as though 'literature' were no longer published or read). 

Would there be changes to your approach? Would there be differences in the way you completed work if there were never any deadlines. 

In other words - How would you write if your work were purely for your own joy, and that of those you know? The same?

And then I'd like to know what on earth David R is doing here and how did he slip through your very thorough screenings?

If no longer read at all, there would be no need for me, but since you ask about "hand-bound limited edition stuff," I suspect you mean exactly that. The answer is that I'm already pretty close. I broke up (sweetly, mind you) with my second agent and have depended entirely on requests for my work for publication ever since.

This method does not smack of "savvy" behavior, but it pleases me, in all but matters of distribution and wider sales--please go and buy some more copies of my books and give them out on the street corner! Better and easier, just assist Lady Word of Mouth in her much-needed work of sending out little messages when you like my books.

All this change means that I have been publishing with some of the houses who asked me to submit because they liked my writing. It has been a great relief to me to find that publishers and presses do ask for work, and that I don't have to go hunting for a publisher (though I may hunt for one for a children's book eventually.)

I have lately published with a range of these publishers: university press (as, my 2012 novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, and my 2011 collection of poetry, The Throne of Psyche); houses that knew me well through prior requests for my work for their anthologies (novel Val/Orson and collection The Foliate Head); and small press (Thaliad, where the publisher knew an excerpt before asking for the whole poem.) Several of those publications were labors of love by artist and designer and writer in a way that approaches the hand-bound aesthetic. Three of the books appeared as limited editions in hardcover. (See tabs above to read more about any of them.)

Deadlines aren't usually much of an issue because I appear to be what's considered fast in the world of writers, though I am slowed down by other commitments at times (my three children, the NBA judging stint, etc.) To me, the way I work does not seem fast and is often punctuated by times empty of writing . . . But I can say that if it took me 14 years to complete a book, I would not bother. It's really unfair, isn't it, how time spent and years of labor don't always help and do not mean some greater virtue in the work?

I do write for my own joy and can't say that there's another way for me with poetry and for many passages of fiction. Nonfiction and blogs are not that way but have an interest of their own. Fiction demands workmanlike bridges and ladders that are sometimes less than joyful, of course. Re-writing and tinkering are oddly satisfying. My joy comes from playing with language and also from the splendor of a flooding pleasure that comes with bringing something out of nothing--the influx of creative spirit, delicious and vital.

In the end, I look at all this in a simple manner. I have a gift that I did nothing to earn. What matters is what I do with the gift, and that I turn it into further gifts to go out into the world and live. For me, it feels magical and like a return gift that out there in the world, somebody is reading my words and so completing a story or poem.

P. S. I almost forgot that important matter of David R and the ongoing facebook tilts and tourneys and occasional friendly wars. The Balrogs have become very fat on spam and do not guard the gates any longer but lie around burping extravagantly (the borborygme!) and letting out tiny moans. Feel free to pop over and let out a lusty You shall not pass! when David R wanders by with his pack of cats and lemur.

Box of gratitudes no. 1: art kindred

Here we are on Christmas Eve Day--a good time to say thanks. I'm starting with a few of my art kindred.

• To Yolanda Sharpe (artist and singer based in Oneonta but frequently in Cooperstown), and Ashley Cooper (artist and classicist around the corner) for going on their own wondrous paths with resolution, and for being part of my everyday life in the arts.
• To Clive Hicks-Jenkins, for the deep pleasure of collaboration across the Atlantic, especially this year for his marvelous work in making beautiful The Foliate Head and Thaliad.
• To novelists Peg Leon and Alice Lichtenstein and sometimes Ginnah Howard for the Occasional Lunch Club Frolic that reminds me that I'm not alone as a novelist in the wilds between the upper Adirondacks and the Catskills. (Let's have lunch!)
• To Paul Digby for doing exactly what he wants in the realm of composing (and various other arts and crafts that catch his fancy), and for the fact that making videos for my poems is one of the things he wants.
• To Mary Boxley Bullington (Mary, bad thing! Update that blog...) for making a painting inspired by The Book of the Red King, for introducing me to the work of potter Steve Mitchell, and for visits in Roanoke. (If you want to see more of her work, visit facebook.)

Throne Sampler

Here are links to some of the poems from The Throne of Psyche that are on this site--probably I have posted some others, but these popped up easily. So here they are in one place, so you wander through them and have a sense of the book. At 109 pages, the book is rather long for a volume of poetry, so there's plenty left to discover.

Cover image: Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Designed by Burt and Burt

As for ordering a book that has now been out some months, you probably will have to order it through your favorite indie or else order from an online site. Books don't stay in stock at brick-and-mortar stores for very long these days, especially poetry books.  For comments, reviews, an interview, and more, go here.

About the Digby videos, with links

The Marriage Bed, from the title poem
and how to find more of the title poem

A Fire in Ice (riposte to Billy Collins)
Southern to the Bone
Here We Go Round

At Cullowhee
When Demons Ruled
Snow White in Wildwood

Three little poems for my three children:
Tears of a Boy, Age Six
A Child at the Tropic Pavilions
In Extremis

* * *
Next book: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage 
(Mercer University Press, 2012)
Inaugural winner
of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction

Art magic & "Requiem"

"Angel in the Graveyard," courtesy of sxc.hu and Lesley Mackin
of Bournemouth, Dorset, UK.

One of the strange aspects to art is how it draws all things to its net--or so it feels to the maker.  All large works seem to have some sort of magnetic power to draw what is needed, but I suppose it is just simply that the world is full of many things, and when turning to a new pursuit, some suddenly stand out as if lit from below.  As I work on the text to Requiem, the collaborative piece to be done with composer Paul Digby and painter Lynn Digby, the world seems to offer the particular jog I need--a photograph of 11th century graves cut in stone and gilded by the sun, a certain poem by Cavafy, the frost on the windowpane... Too, this long sequence with its traditional structure reaches out to embrace the closing of two lives in the past two months--a suicide, a death from cancer--two events that meant so much not just to me but to the entire community where I now live. Small as a fleck or word or as large as a generous life:  each thing leaps into place. Perhaps it is as close to magic as I can come through words.

Current Digby videos of my poems + news

In Extremis from The Throne of Psyche: film and music by Paul Digby

The Exile's Track from The Throne of Psyche: film and music by Paul Digby

The Nesting Doll from The Throne of Psyche:  film and music by Paul Digby

A Fire in Ice from The Throne of Psyche:  film and soundscape by Paul Digby

The Birthday Roses from the manuscript of fall 2010, The Book of the Red King:  film and music by Paul Digby

Next up:  some videos for The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, forthcoming) and The Book of the Red King (to be submitted this year.) We already have the three division pages for The Foliate Head, and Clive Hicks-Jenkins is working on the cover... And I am doing final scrubs on the 140+ poems of The Book of the Red King. I have cut some but imagine it will run about 145 poems in all.

The Lydian Stones will be back next week--I'm waiting until after Twelfth Night!

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!