5 more PP-preorder days--

Art by the great Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales.
Design by Elizabeth Adams.

Five days left to pre-order The Book of the Red King in hardcover or paperback from Phoenicia Publishing, nab a discount, and support the small press directly. (Hardcovers will only be available from the publisher; paperbacks will be available widely.)

Praise for THE BOOK OF THE RED KING

"Marly Youmans is brilliant, perhaps a genius. Her poems tell a story, offering us a vision of, well, I would say the Trinity, but that is only one possible interpretation. After a difficult and sometimes dangerous journey, a Red King, a Fool, and Precious Wentletrap converge into one, a resurrection that is heavenly. Is it true, or is it fable or fairytale? "When I want to write a new book," she has said, "I run across the land and leap off the edge of the known world." Her formal poems are impeccable and include sestinas, villanelles, rondels, rhyming schemes she may have invented, and perfect metrical patterns. Every poet can learn from this poet, and the reader—the reader will be spellbound."
--Kelly Cherry, poet, novelist, and former Poet Laureate of Virginia

"The Book of the Red King by Marly Youmans is an ambitious, magical book about the nature of power and language.  The Red King and the Fool, while they control different realms, make us consider whether it is better to rule on earth or in one’s imagination. In these gorgeous poems, Youmans makes the case for both.  Whatever side we take, Youmans reminds us of the paradox in each.  Even if we side with the Fool in this world of “hurt joy,” we are left with the realm of poetry.   It is not a bad trade.  For those who love well-formed poems and for those who love fantasy, this is a must-read and a distinctive, evocative voice. There is no one like Marly Youmans."
--Kim Bridgford, celebrated poet, editor, and director of the global conference, Poetry by the Sea
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"Marly Youmans occupies an imaginative space that straddles both the present and the mythological past. It is the territory of Yeats and Tolkien, and Youmans shares not only a taste for primal imagery with these great poets, but also their love of rhyme, rhythm and sound."
--A. M. Juster, award-winning poet and translator

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Clive with St. George, the dragon, maiden,
and his late, lamented little jackanapes...

About Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Clive Hicks-Jenkins was born in Newport, south Wales, in 1951. The early part of his career was as a choreographer and stage director. In the 1990s he turned away from theatre to concentrate on painting. He has been praised by critics in The Independent, Modern Painters and Art Review. Simon Callow has called him ‘one of the most individual and complete artists of our time' and Nicholas Usherwood in Galleries has described his work as ‘reflective, expressive painting of the highest order.’

The House of Words (no. 20): Dave Bonta and internet publishing, 1

http://www.phoeniciapublishing.com/odes-to-tools.html
Sail off to Phoenicia for audio files, purchases,
and information about Dave Bonta.
 

Today begins a conversation with Dave Bonta, who is well-known for his many online enterprises, mentioned below. He also has several new print books, one being Ode to Tools from Phoenicia Publishing. Publisher Beth Adams says of that "Dave's popular blog, Via Negativa, contains six years of his almost-daily essays, poems, photographs and videos, but this is -- rather incredibly, considering the blog's breadth and consistently high quality -- the first book that's come out of it. Though he lives on a fairly remote mountainside in rural Pennsylvania, Dave is quick to point out that he's 'not nearly as handy as these odes might suggest' and that his favorite tool is the computer mouse. A writer of poems since the age of seven whose work has appeared in numerous publications, he's now the co-editor of qarrtsiluni online literary magazine and an author who has fully embraced the Internet but says he's 'way more excited to read these poems in print than he thought he'd be.' We hope you'll be excited too."

Dave also has a chapter of poems in the soon to be launched anthology, The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the work of Clive Hicks-Jenkins. This gorgeous, profusely-illustrated book will be launched with a reading at Aberystwyth University on May 6th, with all five living poets in attendance and Clive reading for the late Catriona Urquhart. I'm looking forward to meeting Dave in Wales and reading with him.

Co-distributed by the Grey Mare Press (UK)
and Carolina Wren Press (US)

MY: You have a little empiry with qarrtsiluni, Via Negativa, Woodrat Photoblog, The Morning Porch, and Moving Poems (not to mention Festival of the Trees and other side activities I may not even see.) When and how did you start, and does your internet world just expand gradually in time, or have you had some sort of plan — is it simply wandering and finding new paths?

DB: Yes, it's been gradual and completely unplanned. I began posting things on the web in early 2003, as we were ramping up to invade Iraq. My first site was on the now-defunct Geocities. My only internet access then was a glacially slow dial-up connection at my parents' house. Prior to that, I had shared essays and occasional poems via email lists, so it felt like a natural next step, especially since some of the friends whose email lists I'd taken to hijacking — patriotic sorts sharing jingoistic cartoons and the like — were beginning to wise up and cloak the address list so I couldn't respond with a "reply all."

Geocities had no comment feature, so the only feedback was by email or occasional links from other, more widely read websites. Still, I didn't know any better and it was fun having my own site, with pages for homebrew recipes and forest issues as well as essays, which were in the lyrical-political style of Arundhati Roy and Eduardo Galeano. Had I not been on a slow boil about our war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it would've taken me a lot longer to get an online soapbox, I'm sure, given that I am both very lazy and generally averse to change.

Friends started telling me about Blogger that summer, but like most literary snobs I turned my nose up at it, both because of the absurd and ugly word, "blog," and also because of what I was hearing about blogs in the mainstream media: that they were filled with worthless minutiae of people's daily lives and/or links accompanied by minimal, uninformed comments. It didn't seem at all attractive. When I finally did start a Blogger site in mid-December 2003, I called it Via Negativa in part because I had a chip on my shoulder about the medium, and wanted to see if I could take writing about nothing and kick it up a notch or two.

I am eternally grateful to Blogger for forcing me to learn HTML, and later CSS. The only way to get links in the sidebar back then was to edit the template, and Blogger didn't even have a native comments system yet, so like everyone else I had to paste in the code for Haloscan comments. Of course, once I got comments, it changed the whole equation. Now, I no longer had to leave the mountain to share ideas with like-minded people. Eight years later, I remain good friends with at least a dozen people I met in those first couple months of blogging, including my co-editor at qarrtsiluni, Beth Adams. Her blog the cassandra pages was a major water cooler, in those pre-Facebook days, for left-liberal intellectuals with an interest in art, religion, and culture.

Continued