Seren of the Wildwood March readings--

Saturday, March 18  3:00

Reading with Sally Thomas

City Lights Bookstore 

3 East Jackson St.

Sylva, North Carolina

828-586-9499

Thursday, March 23 7:00 p.m.

Reading with Sally Thomas

Goldberry Books

12 Union St. South

Concord, North Carolina

(980) 439-5050

Friday, March 10

Launch Party near D. C.

The Washington Review: "Charles and Tessa Carman will host novelist and poet Marly Youmans [“the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers.” —John Wilson] for a house reading and signing of her new novel-in-verse Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood Books) on Friday, March 10, at 7 p.m. Interested folks can RSVP tlccarman[at]protonmail.com"

Thanks to the Carman family for a wonderful launch party!

Charis at year's end, again...

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Thank you to Melanie Bettinelli and The Wine-Dark Sea for calling Charis in the World of Wonders "probably my favorite book of the year and the one I am most likely to recommend to anyone looking for a good book to read, and especially for a bookclub." She describes the book as "luminous" and says that she "cannot praise it highly enough." 

If you want to read why she thinks so, jump into The Wine-Dark Sea at this very spot.

I'm glad to see Charis walking onto her 6th year's end list. She's a intrepid traveler. And she's on the list with my friend Sally Thomas's Motherland (at Able Muse, Bookshop.org, Amazon, bn.com, local indies etc.) So pleasant!

New reading, new poems--

POETRY, MOSTLY

I've been down in Carolina for some weeks, and of course I did not bring enough books with me (because who can bring enough?), even though there are books here as well, and I somehow tumbled into the lovely Harry Alter Books while my mother was at PT and came out with a Modern Library Pound Poems and Translations, some Horace odes, a pretty Petrarch collection, and Rupert Brooke. This plunge into book-greed happened despite the fact that I toted plenty of books with me, including the new Sally Thomas and Jane Greer collections (if you didn't see our three-way reading, it's mostly--minus a bit of techno-slip--on my Charis in the World of Wonders page, near the end. Jane reads from Love Like a Conflagration and Sally from Motherland.)

The reason I succumbed to another Pound collection was that I had the yen to read him while reading Timothy Steele's interesting nonfiction book, Missing Measures. Having a memory like a sieve, I did not recall--or else Steele has been an indefatigable hunter--so many expressions of uncertainty about vers libre from Pound, Eliot, and Williams. I'm afraid I laughed at Eliot's dismay when his niece sends him some of her school-assigned homework: free verse poems. What you and the public schools have unleashed on us, Thomas Stearns! A Niagara of poems... Steele talks at length about the disappointment of all three with what was accomplished, and how no hoped-for new metric emerges from Modernism and why that might be. It's a fascinating book that zooms back to the classical world to show the roots of free verse, and how various ideas pertaining to prose writing and poetry writing become braided, swapped, or muddled along the way. It's a useful book for any young poet, I would think, and might just convince one of the need to return to roots, or at least examine them.

A FEW POEMS JUST OUT AND ONLINE

"An Apple Tree Carol"

at 

Ekstasis

and

"The Little Place"
at
North American Anglican

(Click on my name for lots more.)

and some

at 

"Reverie,"

"Silk," 

and

"Metamorphoses." 

So that's 3 poems at Patrick Key's new Grand Little Things.

DR. JOHNSON

Versification, or the art of modulating his numbers, is indispensably necessary to a poet. Every other power by which the understanding is enlightened or the imagination enchanted may be exercised in prose. But the poet has this peculiar  superiority, that to all the powers  which  the perfection of every other composition can require  he adds the faculty of  joining music with reasons, and of acting at once upon the senses  and the passions.

If you missed our video...

If you were cast into woe by missing the Greer - Thomas - Youmans reading, here it is. I couldn't get youtube to accept an image of all three of us; we are too complex for youtube, it seems! So apologies that it's just my cover as thumbnail.

Jane Greer - Love like a Conflagration 

Sally Thomas - Motherland 

Marly Youmans - Charis in the World of Wonders

12 June 2020
via Zoom

ZOOMFEST!

You are invited

to a

Pandemic Book Party

Jane Greer, Sally Thomas, Marly Youmans

reading from their new books:

two poetry collections and a novel.

Live

on

Friday, June 12

North America: 

3:00 Eastern, 

2:00 Central, 

1:00 Mountain, 

noon Pacific.

World time zone converter HERE.

Register in advance 

HERE. 

Jane Greer,

Love Like a Conflagration

Jane Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. Her poetry collections include Bathsheba on the Third Day (1986) and Love like a Conflagration (2020).

For  more about Jane, hop HERE

Buy her book via indies, Lambing Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and more...

Sally Thomas,

Motherland

Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry book, Motherland, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award, and is available now from Able Muse Press.

For Motherland news at Sally's site, skip over to HERE

Buy her book via indies, Able Muse, Amazon, Bookshop, and more...

Marly Youmans,

Charis in the World of Wonders

Author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction, including The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia Publishing, 2019) and Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius Press, 2020.)

For reviews, purchase venues, blurbs, etc., jump HERE

On traveling in the past: Charis in the World of Wonders

One of the demands of writing a novel set in the past is that a writer not put people and thoughts of his or her own day into fancy dress. Not give us woke people in linsey-woolsey. Not present people with our own concerns about climate (well, maybe if it's a Ruskin--so prescient!) or our own beliefs about how a woman may be heroic or our own attitudes toward childbirth or child-rearing or many another thing. In Catherwood, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Maze of Blood, and now Charis in the World of Wonders, my desire is always to enter into another world, to believe that time is a realm I can find and walk around in if I am imaginative and reasonably knowledgeable. 

For the new book, one wish of mine was that Charis be a convincing citizen of the godly (Puritan to us), and that I would not fail to enter into her feelings about family, the wilderness, native peoples, the French, God, marriage, childbirth, community, and all the terrors and pleasures of the New World. And where she came to differ from the most common view, it had to be because she was forced by circumstances to learn something new that tempered or transformed what she thought to be the truth. It struck me that the most difficult thing to portray for contemporary readers would be religious faith and feeling, now so alien to many, and so easy to get wrong.

So I was especially pleased to see a comment about Charis's faith from poet Sally Thomas, discussing a review at the DarwinCatholic blog. Here it is, pilfered from facebook:

I particularly appreciate the allusion to Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy in this review. I hadn't thought of those two novels as parallel in any way, but among other things, a comparison on the point of the un-ironic handling of religious sensibility is apt. It is so very, very easy for the contemporary novel to wink and nudge at the reader – the religious characters are either dumber than we are in their belief, or are hypocrites whom we see through (wink wink nudge nudge). Or else they're caught in amber, as not-quite-living relics of a not-quite-living past. 

What I think both Charis and Mariette accomplish (though this is far from the only thing both novels accomplish) is to present a spectrum of characters, a whole human range of people, who all believe in God (and further, operate wholly within the world of a shared tradition of belief). There is awareness of a world outside that tradition – for Charis it's the indigenous tribes and the Catholic French. In fact, Charis goes farther in imagining the whole diverse tapestry of its world than I remember Mariette's doing. But the world that is each novel's focus is itself a tapestry of human personalities and livings-out of belief. This is part of why, as a novel taking up religion as a concern, each one rings true.

And surprise, Sally Thomas is doing a launch for her poetry book Motherland on Zoom on this very day at 3:00! Go HERE if you want an invitation.

Post-Pasadena

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

*

Sunny California

I had a wondrous time at Fujimura Institute with Joe Gallagher, Makoto Fujimura, Pete Candler, Jia Kim, Esther Meek, Curt Thompson, and Shann Ray. And some other in-residence Fujimura Fellows. Writers, filmmakers, philosopher, neuropsychiatrist, painter, cellist! Many chats, interviews, and a concert...

Most of all, thank you to Joe and Mako for inviting me. Thanks to writer Kristen Havens and actor Keisuke Hoashi for picking me up at LAX and taking me to dinner in Culver City and showing me their interesting life. Thanks to Dea Jenkins for a ride back to LAX. Thanks to Stephen Dudro for showing me around the Huntington and gardens on my first day before events began, and to Joe for taking me to the Norton Simon Museum in a free hour. Thanks to Eric Tai for the hand-drawn map, and to Julia for the kintsugi workshop.

And I flew home and caught a bug along the way, alas, but it does not seem to be The Bug.

*

Lady Word of Mouth

I am planning to pay more attention to my Lady Word of Mouth site in this time of launch and event cancellations, and hope you will as well. Just yesterday my keynote talk and workshops were canceled in Albany, and I am sure many such planned or tentatively planned events are simply not going to happen. Please give some extra love to writers, artists, and indie filmmakers in this peculiar time. Today a page for Sally Thomas's new book, Motherland, went up. Please take a look!

*

St. Patrick's Day Pandemic Book Launch

On facebook, I posted an imaginary book launch for Tuesday, when my novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, will be released. Ignatius has bumped up the pub date, and so perhaps they are hoping for the good interventions of the saint! That would surprise Charis, the Puritan girl, I expect...

The Red King's Friends

Please drop by the page for The Book of the Red King, now with additional new and enticing comments from novelist Scott G. F. Bailey, poet Ray Oliver, much-laureled poet and novelist Fred Chappell, poet Sally Thomas, poet Jeffery Beam, and poet and novelist Sebastian Doubinsky. The last of these posted a review on my birthday yesterday: lovely gift!

At right: a precious wentletrap by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... The Fool's beloved is the lunar lady, Precious Wentletrap.

Some recent online poems

Reliquary Bust of Saint Margaret of Antioch.
Attributed to Nicolaus Gerhaert van Leyden
(act. in Germany, 1462 - 73),
Netherlandish. 1465-70.
Walnut with traces of polychromy.
Art Institute of Chicago.
Wikipedia Commons.

These poems work pretty well as a sort of group...

A poem up today at First Things: "An Icon of St. Margaret." And it is in good company with poems by Sally Thomas (fellow Carolina poet with a book forthcoming from Able Muse), Daniel Rattelle (grad student in writing at St. Andrews), poet and scholar James Matthew Wilson, and more.

* **

"The Secret from the Ground" in North American Anglican.

* * *

"Hydrangeas" in North American Anglican.

***

"Both Sides of the River" in Young Ravens Literary Review: A Biannual Online Literary Journal. The centering is the 'zine's choice.