April! A very big poetry-month sale at Stanza Press

UPDATE 4/5: So sorry, I think we may already be sold out of the second printing! There are a few copies left at online sellers but not at sale price.  UPDATE 4/20: I understand that the above may be wrong, and that there are 60 copies remaining, but the site still says out of print. They've promised to look into the situation... More when I know! The Foliate Head, a hardcover poetry collection normally selling for £15.00, is on sale for a paltry £4.00; some of the other books are on sale at Stanza for a mere £2.00, including Matt Bialer's Tell Them What I Saw and Jo Fletcher's anthology, Off the Coastal Path. See the whole sale list here.

The Foliate Head is a gorgeous-looking little book with profuse green man art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design by Andrew Wakelin. I'll add some poems below so you may judge whether it is also good in other ways; there are a few on the page for the book as well. 

Thank you to publisher Pete Crowther for asking for a book, and for allowing the threesome of me and Clive and Andrew to have our way with it! I'm very glad that it went into a second printing.


"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour, / Of which vertu engendred is the flour," then we simply must have a poetry-month sale. (Thank you, Geoffrey Chaucer and Pete, again.)

PUCK IN SPRING

Now the catamount will scream,

Now the bears awake from dream

That the winter’s night prolongs

Till the ice dissolves in songs.

Now the daybreak fires the mist

By the mountain ridges kissed.

While the crocus blossoms yield,

Opening along the field.

Now it is the hour in spring

When the jetting sap will bring

Fresh desire to boy and girl

Waking to a brighter world.

And the fairies hunting shade,

Finding meadow grass arrayed

With the bloom of early bells,

Creep inside the fragrant cells.

Now in clearing, vale, and slope,

All the land is drunk with hope—

In the ancient greening weald,

Now is loosed what once was sealed.

Why, the very mountains reel

At the turning of the wheel.

“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.

THE MAGNOLIA GIRL

She climbed the great magnolia tree

To learn the ways of bird and bee,

And there the Prince of Darkness came

To tempt her with delicious shame.

He bore her up and bore her down,

He let her try his royal crown

While leaves went clattering-a-clack

Like gossips warning at her back.

A burst of starlight from his face,

His every move a sigh of grace—

Could you resist his lightsome wiles,

Or stop the arrows of his smiles?

What was a tendency to hiss

When set beside a glowing kiss?

In long-ago and far-away,

She danced her dance the livelong day—

She showed him all her naked skin,

And what they did was mortal sin.

When boredom dulled his passion’s rage,

The Serpent Prince desired a cage;

He jailed her in the blooming tree

And spread a lie that she was free.

Addicted to the streaming light

From which her lover once took flight,

She now repents those leisure hours

Misspent among magnolia flowers. 

Leaves of the Head

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has moved on from the eight final images for the cover of The Foliate Head, though you may still vote  on your favorite one (or two) if you like.  Now he has bent his own leafy mind to interior green men, or "green men in black and white."

And we have now been given absolute freedom in almost every way to frolic with the book design. Pete Crowther, publisher of Stanza Press (UK), has given us his blessing to do whatever we like save change the dimensions of the book! So this means much pleasure for author, artist, and designer...

Andrew Wakelin designed the two books in Clive's honor which came out at the time of the retrospective show last year, and they are both beautiful--the gorgeous art book from Lund Humphries that accompanied the exhibition, Clive Hicks-Jenkins; and The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins from Gray Mare and Carolina Wren. Andrew will also be in charge here. Andrew, Clive, and I are the conspirators who will have our say, and that will be great fun.

Leaves in our hair--

I'm afraid that life has been a bit too busy lately. But I have been moving forward despite the dragons and rocks and pits in the path. One maiden has been rescued, a new chariot acquired post-Irene, and much late-night oil burned.  I turned in the page proofs of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I read Thaliad entirely too many times and then finally tossed in the final version, my fingers crossed that I did not introduce any errors accidentally into the text (start thinking that way and then the number of reads becomes infinite!) Next I wrote a review of Bei Dao's selected poems, even though I know no Chinese--a great handicap, I am afraid--and sent that off yesterday.

And now I doing a  last polish on The Foliate Head so that I can give the final version to Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Andrew Wakelin. Andrew designed Clive's two smashingly beautiful books for his 60th birthday retrospective at The National Library of Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and now he is going to work with us out of the considerable goodness of his heart, using the Stanza Press template. So we are doing our own thing instead of relying on the press entirely. And that will be quite interesting and fruitful, I think. We do need to make it "look" like a Stanza Press book, but we can do our own version. I'm very glad that Pete Crowther asked me for a poetry manuscript, and that he and designer Mike Smith are letting us fool around with the book. Frolics ahead!

The division pages of foliate heads are already done (if you attended Clive's retrospective at The National Library of Wales, you may remember them.) Clive will also do a cover image. It will be a hardcover book with the image printed directly on smooth boards. Although Stanza is not an "artists' books" press, I think it will be a highly collectible item as well as beautiful.

The poems have all appeared somewhere or other, a great many of them by request--I like being asked, as I am lazy in the area of submission. Energetic elsewhere, but lazy there. I find it rather like laundry. You wash, you dry, you fold... Enough! It's done. Who feels like putting the stacks away?

The book is divided into three parts: Powers, The Book of Ystwyth, and The Green World. And it is made up of formal poems: narratives, lyrics, monologues, blank verse, sonnet, couplets, Burmese climbing rhyme, the form of Puck's Song, nonce forms, even a poem in Renaissance poulter's measure. Like contemplating the leafy energy of the world, strange powers, beauty (the poems I wrote for Clive's retrospective are here), and transformation? Then you may want one of these special little books-to-be!

Stanza Press (U.K.) anthology

In a recent interview, Robin Robertson said, "Any comparison between North America and the UK and Ireland always involves scale. They have many poetry publishers and almost too many literary magazines; we have too few." Into the breach leaps the brave and always-surprising writer and publisher Pete Crowther, who has now founded a new English poetry press: Stanza Press.

They're bringing out an anthology as their first book. I am curious to see it, and I like the idea of being included in such a lively mixture--Dana Gioia and Ursula LeGuin and Kipling and Kees and Neil Gaiman and Donne and many more writers, past jostling with present. My poem is "The Ghost Crab's Woman," previously published in John Klima's Electric Velocipede. It is the saddest of tales. Here's the information and the line-up:

Off The Coastal Path
a collection of dark poems from the seaside

Edited by Jo Fletcher
publication date: Early 2010
£15.00 [$24.00]
Hardcover Edition: Introduction: Donald Sidney-Fryer
Cover Artist: Ben Baldwin
ISBN: 978-1-848630-82-6


CONTENTS
Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith
Triptych by Donald Sidney-Fryer
The Sea Went Away by Ray Bradbury
The Storme by John Donne
Three Seas by Tanith Lee
The Port by H.P. Lovecraft
Pier, Beneath by John Kaiine
The Sea-Wife by Rudyard Kipling
To Her Sea-faring Lover from Tottel's Miscellany (1557 )
The Daemon Lover My Last Landlady by Neil Gaiman
Sea Fret by Brian Lumley
The Great Sellie o' Suleskerry
Shuck by Kevin Crossley-Holland
The Ghost Crab's Woman by Marly Youmans
Creation of the Horse by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Great Unknown by Joel Lane
A Half-Broken Heart (On Brighton Pier) by Robert Edric
Keepsake by Peter Crowther
Night Watch by Dana Gioia
Mermaid by James Reidel
The Beach in August by Weldon Kees
Cape Vacatown by Unknown (after Weldon Kees)
Lost by William Hope Hodgson
Admiral Death by Henry Newbolt
Souls Under Water by Judith Barrington
In 1962, on the Harbor Ice by T.M. Wright
Something Happened by Patrick LoBrutto
On Different Shores by Jo Fletcher
Day's End by John Gordon

Book of the Year + 2009 news

Wouldn't it be surprising if a little novel published in a foreign country and in a limited edition caught a "Book of the Year" notice anywhere in the U.S.? We don't seem to pay that much attention to books in short runs, published on the other side of the ocean. I didn't imagine such a thing--though I've been on such lists before, the idea of Val/Orson even making a "Top Ten" list never drifted anywhere near my mind.

But here it is at the end of a list by John Wilson, the editor of Books & Culture:

Book of the Year:

Val/Orson. Marly Youmans. PS Publishing. I quote from Catherynne Valente's excellent introduction to this novella: "It is Shakespearean in its sensibility, with its enchanted wood, its twins, its doubling and quadrupling of couples and families, its fairy brood. It is difficult to say that it is a fantasy novel, and difficult to say it isn't." The word "magical" has been overused and misused to such an extent that it has perhaps lost its potency, but this tale, set among the redwoods of Northern California, is truly magical. I'm sorry it is not as easily obtained as the others on this list, but I can attest—having ordered it from the UK myself—that it is by no means inaccessible. And you will be amply rewarded. More than any other book I read in 2009, this one insistently came to mind.

I was very, very surprised; I am even more pleased!

(And see the post below for news about a Christmas sale on Val/Orson and other P. S. Publishing books...)

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Here are a few more good bookish things that came my way in 2009:

One of them has to be publishing Val/Orson with publisher Pete Crowther and editor Nick Gevers's P. S. Publishing (U.K.). A bonus on this was getting to mull ideas with my penpal Clive Hicks-Jenkins and then see him draw out of his magical hat a most marvelous cover/jacket. In addition, I got to know Robert Freeman Wexler, writer and book designer.

On top of all that, Clive sent me the painting for the jacket...

I am very glad to have a forthcoming hardover / softcover collection of poems: The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011). Our times are not of the best for poets, particularly for ones like me who like to romp in the mind-freeing chains of formal verse... To be asked for a manuscript in these days is sweet. The title poem can be seen here (scroll down)..

At last I have written a book for my third child. I'm not quite done--still typing in changes scribbled on the manuscript--but am almost there. That makes one book for each child of mine, and so may be the end of children's books for me, but who knows?

Last, I have had some encouragement in the midst of the doomy gloom that swirls around publishing by way of a bountiful--a quite exceptional--crop of queries from publishers and editors this year. This despite the fact that I have never received what is known as “a push” in the industry… Encouragement is a lovely thing for a “mid-list writer” who clings to her own way of making poems and stories.

New anthologies & Val/Orson special

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Postscripts 19: The PS Quarterly Anthology (P. S. Publishing) contains my story, "The Red King's Sleep." The publisher says that "this Postscripts anthology is probably the best yet, containing gripping, stylish stories by some of the finest genre writers around . . . Marly Youmans enters the world of Through the Looking Glass from a terrifying angle."

Editorial - Nick Gevers
Daniel Abraham - 'Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance'
Andrew Hook - 'Bigger Than The Beetles'
David T. Wilbanks - 'The Cacto Skeleton'
Matthew Hughes - 'Enemy of the Good'
David N. Drake - 'A Life Cliched'
Marly Youmans - 'The Red King's Sleep'
Tim Lees - 'Meeting Mr. Tony'
Scott Edelman - 'The World Breaks'
Justin Cartaginese - 'The Portrayed Man'
Chrs Beckett - 'The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolis 9'
Ron Savage - 'Famous People'
M.K. Hobson - 'The Warlock and the Man of the Word'

http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/acatalog/Postscripts_19_ltd.html

In addition, P. S. Publishing is running a special on the four P. S. books reviewed recently in "Black Static," including Val/Orson. You may find that offer at the P. S. website: http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2009/08/24/special-offer-the-black-static-foursome-for-just-45/. If you want to see a clip from my "Black Static" review, sail to http://www.marlyyoumans.com/ and check out the Val/Orson page.





















Available for pre-orders at your friendly neighborhood bookstore or elsewhere: The Beastly Bride (Viking), another marvelous anthology from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

My story is "The Salamander Fire," in which you may find a young glassblower, a lawyer who is busy turning into a demon, fire bathers in an underworld, a salamander, and much more. I like the anthologies in this series and am pleased to be in this one.

Author list: Christopher Barzak, Peter Beagle, Steve Berman, Richard Bowes, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Gregory Frost, Nan Fry, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Terra Gearheart, Hiromi Goto, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Steward Moore, Shweta Narayan, Johanna Sinisalo, Lucius Shepard, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, E. Catherine Tobler, Jane Yolen, and Marly Youmans.


Upcoming is Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's anthology, Last Drink Bird Head: Flash Fiction for Charity (Ministry of Whimsy). The author list is nigh-infinite: here. The tale (and the picture) behind this curious anthology can be found at

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/10/last-drink-bird-head-an-october-surprise/.

New anthology, soon-to-be-new book

WE THINK, THEREFORE WE ARE

Somehow I neglected to mention that Pete Crowther's anthology of stories centered around artificial intelligence(Penguin/DAW) is out, including--oddly enough--a story by me. Note the interesting male-to-female numbers here.

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Contents:

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“Tempest 43″ by Stephen Baxter
“The Highway Code” by Brian Stableford
“Savlage Rights” by Eric Brown
“The Kamikaze Code” by James Lovegove
“Adam Robots” by Adam Roberts
“Seeds” by Tony Ballantyne
“Lost Places of the Earth” by Steven Utley
“The Chinese Room” by Marly Youmans
“Three Princesses” by Robert Reed
“The New Cyberiad” by Paul Di Filippo
“That Laugh” by Patrick O’Leary
“Alles in Ordnung” by Garry Kilworth
“Sweats” by Keith Brooke
“Some Fast Thinking Needed” by Ian Watson
“Dragon King of the Eastern Sea” by Chris Roberson

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Harriet Klausner, who is surely the quickest and most prolific reviewer on the face of the planet, already has a review and notes, "the compilation is superb as the authors contribute diverse tales with some seemingly weird like Marly Youmans' 'The Chinese Room' adding depth and variety." "Weird," eh? This was the last thing I wrote during my Yaddo stay, and when I fired it off to Pete, he did mention something about it being just a bit different.

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For those of you who are allergic to artificial intelligence, it may comfort you to know that there are no robots whatsoever in "The Chinese Room," though there is a computer. There are midgets and ex-jockeys and general commotion. There are sausages in bed. There is childbirth. There is pent-up love from here to China.

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The story is based on the "Chinese Room" thought experiment of John Searle. As our friend Wiki says, "The Chinese Room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle (Searle 1980), which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may behave." For more about the original Chinese room, go visit Wiki, right here.

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VAL/ORSON

“Flap copy” for spring’s book, Val/Orson, is up at last. As I am feeble and Milquetoastish when it comes to proper boasting, I enlisted help. And now the thing seems properly flappy and boastful. See here!

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The two limited editions (plain or signed and fancy, take your pick!) are available through the online catalogue at http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/. Thanks to bloggers and reviewers who have let me know they would like a pre-publication e-copy of the book to review or feature; if anyone else would like to sign on, write me or leave me a note here.

Catherynne Valente has written a lovely introduction as well, so that will go up some time closer to the spring pub date, along with a jacket image and other news.

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This book is also associated with publisher Pete Crowther because he and Nick Gevers were kind enough to ask for a short novel for their novella series (U.K.: P. S. Publishing). I love to be asked, as does every writer I know, and I love it when people read and like my work and want to see more. Thanks to both of them.

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CHILDHOOD & WRITING

E

I was talking to my mother yesterday, and she mentioned that I knew in third grade that I was going to be a writer, and that it was perfectly clear to her what I would be. Interesting. I find that I have a rather soupish memory which renders much down to alphabet when I would like to have clear text.

e

She was standing under the pear tree in our family home in Collins, Georgia. The blossoms were not quite open... This summer I canned pears off that tree. One of my childhood memories is of my Aunt Sara fishing a snake out of that tree with a hoe and killing it, chopchopchop.