Charisean, Clivean, and poems!

Yellow Hen and Sunflowers. 2021. Oil, gouache and pencil on panel. 
All paintings from the current
Clive Hicks-Jenkins series...

CHARIS, CLIVE, SUSSEX, MORE!

Clive Hicks-Jenkins made chapter headings and the cover of Charis in the World of Wonders. Then the chapter headings became a cunning line of plates, cups, bowls, teapots, etc. from Sussex Lustreware! And now Clive has made a whole series of paintings featuring the Sussex Lustreware with Charis chapter headings. 

Next up, I'm expecting wallpaper, fabric, everything in the world to be Charisean and Clivean! He is such a clever fellow...

Swan and Snail, 2021
Oil, gouache and pencil on panel.

CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS

HERE's an extended review of Charis in the World of Wonders by a retired English teacher, posting at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles Community Forum. 

Clip: "People today are regrettably predisposed to assume they know all they need to know about the people of Marly Youmans's novel. They may enjoy the fresh air that will blow through their minds when they read this accomplished novel."

This painting has a Sussex "Loyal Friend" mug
nestled into a toy theatre
by Jim Pilston.

WILLOWS WEPT

Had lots of lovely feedback on "Birds and Lilies in Rugosa Canes" (poem.) It's on p. 44, but you can flip through and read the whole magazine HERE.

I'll have to nab the title from Clive later--
don't see it with the facebook image.

EKSTASIS

"The Curtal Candlelight at Tenebrae" (poem) can be found by flying HERE.

This one has garnered lots of gorgeous comments here and there, but I think my favorite might be this: 

FIRST THINGS

And if you missed "Starting with a Sentence by Aidan Hart" at First Things, pop over HERE to read. I love Aidan Hart's book on icons and much more, Beauty Spirit Matter. This poem also found a lot of readers and commenters--a thing which I appreciate so much.

                                                        Cockerel and Lustreware Teapot. 2021

Oil, gouache and pencil on panel.

Formal frolics, just up--

Just home from four days in New Hampshire, and pleased to find people sharing two new poems of mine on social media... enjoy!

Self-portrait as Ruth the Moabite at Measure Review

Pilfered from Measure Review on Twitter: "Writing in a nonce form that's half-sestina and half-ghazal, #poet Marly Youmans (@marlyyoumans) has created a stunning and hopeful #poem worth remembering - and form worth trying yourself. Read it now at http://measurereview.org. #measurereview" 

Seaside Pentina for a Chinese Painter at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

"Editor’s Note: This delightful pentina uses lush imagery to draw the reader into a landscape that feels as ephemeral as a painting, but with a structure that perfectly encapsulates the concept of 'li'."

Playlist! Hidden Cathedral poets!

Back from five weeks in the Carolina mountains, and the 24 videos of poems by various poets made for The Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration are now up as a public playlist on youtube. Thanks to those who followed the Cathedral Arts blog (subscribe here) and the celebration--finale on the 22nd with Malcolm Guite.

Christmas, Charis, Willows

And it's Christmas Eve day! 

Here's stellar Fra Angelico, dreaming the Madonna and naked infant Christ 

with embodied angels, Peter of Verona, Thomas Aquinas, Barnabas, Dominic. 

Detail, Fiesole altarpiece, 1422, Convent of San Dominico. 

Public domain CC wikipedia.

Some bits of news:

Short version, Englewood Review of Books

"Twelve Important Fiction Books of 2020" https://www.goodreads.com/.../156371.ERB_Twelve_Important...

and

Longer version of the Charis in the World of Wonders page... 

https://englewoodreview.org/twelve-important-fiction.../12/

"The Changes," "The Ruined Garden," and "Come to the Selvage of the Sea" kick off issue 19 Winter  2021 of Willows Wept: https://willowswept.com/ and https://www.magcloud.com/webviewer/1903662?__r=150177&s=w for the online version...  (And weirdly, the cover image by Troy Urquhart shows a Cherokee spot only a few miles from Cullowhee, NC, where I went to high school and still spend part of every year.)

Reading with the Plague Papers

Reading a poem live 

Tuesday, November 17 

at 5:00 EST 

with The Plague Papers (anthology of ekphrastic poems based on pieces from museum collections) cohort! For a link to the event, please RSVP by email to poemeleon@gmail.com OR message me privately on twitter or facebook. Hosted by Robbi Nester and Cati Porter.

Tonight at Easton Book Festival

Marly at Easton Book Festival

***

Hosted by editor and book critic John Wilson

7:00 p.m. EST 

November 15

Easton Book Festival event release:  "Marly Youmans is one of today’s masters of language and imagination. Her poetry and fiction blend fantastic, historical, and everyday elements that have delighted readers for decades. In this program, book critic and editor John Wilson introduces a series of dramatic readings of Youmans’s fiction and poetry, from her critically acclaimed Catherwood (1996) to her recently released Charis in the World of Wonders."

Readers include artist, writer, and culture shaper Makoto Fujimura, actor Keisuke Hoashi, professor and writer Chris Phillips, and theatre student Lauren Stango.

UPDATE, THE LOWDOWN FROM ON HIGH: 

"The broadcast is at 7pm EST tonight (I.e., very soon), and will be on eastonbookfestival.com and the festival’s YouTube channel: 

https://www.youtube.com/.../UC6x2DUva4.../featured

[Makoto Fujimura] is uploading his recording, and I’ll add it to a new version of the video." So there will be a slightly longer recorded version up later that includes Mako reading from Charis in the World of Wonders.

The Plague Papers at Poemeleon

"The Wife's Reply," originally at Autumn Sky Poetry, is now part of poet Robbi Nester's anthology The Plague Papers. The online anthology is inviting and colorful, images that inspired its poems arranged in a lovely table-of-contents grid by Cati Porter of Poemeleon, where the online book is housed.

Clip from Robbi's introduction:  In this anthology, the only one of its kind to my knowledge, we have asked writers to choose individual items from [museum] collections, and to tell us about them in poetry or prose. The works are listed alphabetically by the names of the museums in which the objects are located. Like other forms of Ekphrasis, the resulting works may interpret the work in question, imagine its creation, comment on the difference between the work online and in person, or spin a narrative about it, but with the aid of the link included with each piece, readers can immediately visit the museums and see for themselves what all the fuss is about. This book will introduce them to institutions they may explore for themselves online and perhaps, after the danger has passed, in person.

Mine is a response to an Old English poem in The Exeter Book (circa 970), housed in the library collection belonging to the Exeter Cathedral. Traditionally known as "The Husband's Message," the somewhat-damaged lines convey an exiled man's call for his wife or his betrothed to cross the sea to meet him. In riddling style (The Exeter Book also holds riddles), the request is spoken by a tree that has learned to speak, its wood now holding a carved, runic, secret cry.

About Robbi: Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019). She has also edited two other anthologies, one of which, Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees, was also published as a special issue of Poemeleon.

A dim, gloomy Hallowmas...
Starting my mandated quarantine with All Saints Day...
Here's how the family welcomed me home...
Giant jack o' lanterns (minus one some mischievous Yankee stole)
and lady ghost and owl and noisy skull-knocker...

All Saints in the wee hours...
First snow of winter is on the giant pumpkins and chrysanthemums...
Snow plows scraping and jingling...
900 miles from Cullowhee...
Guess I'm really and truly back in Cooperstown.

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.

Clive, Charis, clips, poems

CLIVE'S LATEST PRINT WITH PENFOLD PRESS

Interested in the multitudinous making of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has illuminated so many of my  books and made them beautiful? Here's yet another affordable chance to own a bit of his work.

Clip from his website: Launched today, my new print edition with Dan Bugg at Penfold Press, The Tiger’s Bride. It marks a return to a theme I explored in my first print with the Penfold Press, Man Slain by a Tiger. The two prints have a common interest in Staffordshire Pottery and in particular their ‘penny-dreadful’ celebration of awful events. Based on the Staffordshire group titled The Death of the Lion Queen, my print draws on the history of Ellen Bright, who in 1850 at Wombwell’s Menagerie entered a cage of mixed big cats for the entertainment of the crowd. 

Go here to read more about the tragical tale of Ellen Bright.

CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

&

THE ELEGY BETA

"But mostly, I’ve been reading this wonderful new novel by Marly Youmans. Holy smokes you guys, the tension in this thing, and the sense of foreignness, and the pacing! I’m not finished with it yet, but I can’t see it being bested for my favorite novel of the year." --writer Mischa Willett, in Buttondown (his newsletter)

Mischa Willett's collection, The Beta Elegy, is suddenly on sale for less than $5. at Amazon--the hardcover! Might be a mistake, but there it is for now...

Here's poet Dan Rattelle's review of The Beta Elegy. Clip: Irreverent. Colloquial. Unexpected. And daringly funny. I once read in a Creative Writing handbook that one should use words like ‘grandmother’ rather than ‘grandma’ in a poem because they carry more weight. Hmm. Willet is also willing to take for granted that his readers’ grandmas also baked lasagna and crocheted superfluous hats. And thus, I do not need to explain the joke. There is also a delightful poem about the sort of typeface used in a note to tell someone he cannot make it to a wedding in Long Island (why is Long Island funny? It just is).

READ THIS!

Of course, a person (this person, anyway) often likes an interview because it's so dratted kindred to her own thoughts about many things, but read it anyway: Amit Majmudar at Tributaries.

Here's a clip, the opening paragraph: 

I’ll offer a preliminary historical note on vers libre. As Eliot practiced it, it was really a medley of prior verse forms, roughly juxtaposed. The phonetic runs of blank verse, rhyme, tercets, etc. of, say, Four Quartets, has the same fragmentary nature as the actual snippets of prior literature incorporated into The Waste Land. If practiced like that, free verse required, as its prerequisite, a mastering of or at least familiarity with meter and rhyme in practice; that is, it comes after you get the other ways of writing down. It is a “late” form both in the history of English language poetry and a “late” form in the poet’s technical development. This is no longer understood. Young poets arrive at free verse as their first stop; many never even try writing in meter and rhyme, much less failing often and failing joyfully at it, because they mistakenly locate it in the “past” of poetry.

RECENT ONLINE LINKS

"Youth at the Borderlands" 

in 

Trinity House Review

Various poems and prose "tinies"

at

The North American Anglican

"The Watering Place" 

and

"House at the Edge of Sleep"

in

Mezzo Cammin

"The Aspen Wish"

in 

The Orchards

"The Young Wife's Reply" at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

(Response to "The Husband's Message," c. 970, from the Exeter Book)

The Charis-and-poems news...

Once again, I'm guilty of being lively on twitter and facebook but ignoring the blog! Hope all you passers-by have remained healthy and sane in the midst of topping chaos. A few new notables are below:

I've updated the Charis in the World of Wonders page with some new comments and review clips. A review from novelist H. S. Cross is forthcoming, and another from Robbi Nester, as well as an interview. And the book will be featured on writer Marjorie Hudson's Kitchen Table Writers, an interesting group to join if you're a budding writer. Though it has been sad to have a book come out mid-pandemic (my crazy history of launches timed at disasters!), I hope that Charis--being an indomitable sort--will find her way through the wilderness of this strange time.

Remember how you used to read as a child, stretched out in the grass or on the couch, lost in the magic of a book.... Be prepared to re-enter that world of magical reading, being so engrossed in the world of the book that you never really leave it, living in a dreamy haze of words and beloved characters. Marly Youmans' new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius, 2020) will put you there, into that trance of reading and joy, as though you had never left it.
               --The Hollins Critic, Fall 2020

This I can't skip mentioning; I have several poems in the new issue of Mezzo Cammin edited by the late Kim Bridgford--that's her picture above. It's a lovely, thoughtful image of a bright poet and professor who brought many interesting projects into being and added to the sum of beauty and truth and goodness in the world. Nine of the thirteen poets in this round (Maryann Corbett, Wendy Sloan, Myrna Stone, Jane Scharl, etc.) were chosen by her. As my poems have appeared there many times under her editorship, and I was once lucky enough to be her featured poet, I am glad to be in this issue.  It's not the end of Mezzo Cammin, but it is the close of Kim's actions in the world, though she leaves behind publications, editorial work, the Poetry by the Sea conference, and much more.

Taste of the poems, a title and two lines for each:

House at the Edge of Sleep

She dreamed this: in the field she built a house.
She lugged the stones from streams and built a house.

and

The Watering Place

We wished the stream to be alive, as rinsed
And quick as a twisting blue rill of thought.

Grateful thanks to Anna Evans for continuing Kim's work.

Here's a review of the anthology, The Slumbering Host, by poet Lisa McCabe in Front Porch Republic. I only had a couple of poems in it (reprinted from North American Anglican), but she talks about one of them.

Novelist Eugene Garber on The Book of the Red King

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Pb available via indies, Amazon etc.
Hc & pb available via  Phoenicia Publishing

I have read The Book of the Red King. It is an extraordinary work. It put me in mind of how much I enjoyed Yeats’s early fairyland poems. The poems remain steadfastly otherworldly. They transport the reader to an existence apart. I’m reminded of James’s definition of a romance vs. a novel. In the former the writer cuts the lines that tether the fiction to the earth. Seems to me you do, but there are occasional details that let us know that you know there’s a world below, one more familiar to us and one with real pain. I found this in pages 102-109 and liked the modulation of tone. The poems have their own rich mythology, but I appreciated the slant or even explicit references to Christianity—grail, baptismal basin, baptism by fire, phoenix and no doubt others. The language of the work is rich and often exotic. I especially, though, responded to the varied rhythms. I’m no good at prosody, but I think I found lots of variety—iambic regularity, heavy beats approaching Old English strong stress, and long liquid melodious lines and no doubt more. I especially admire your frequent use of enjambment and the way it moves us across lines. Also stanza forms and a great variety of line breaks.

Some more thematic things. I was often wondering, does the Fool have a self or is he just a pastiche of jester-like roles. On page 27, in an especially beautiful poem, is an image of wholeness in a face even as it’s broken by sunlight and water. This is reassuring. At the bottom of page 111 the matter is in doubt. In “The Silver Cord” an even deeper doubt arises—the specter of nothingness. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Which reminds me that your allusions—Shakespeare, Milton etc. are always apt. So if the book is really the King’s and not the Fool’s (P.127), a proposition not easily accepted given the space given the Fool, then the Fool’s ontological status is one of total dependency. On what? Some God-like presence, or something less? Meanwhile, eternity winks at us. On page 44 we learn that wentletrap can sing a song of endlessness and thus potentially liberate the world of the Fool from time and change. And in the wonderful “Great Work of Time” we have some assurance that our microcosmos is indeed a miniature of a greater cosmic reality. But at the End of “Fool’s Sacrifice,” in a rare moment of metapoetry, we must face the possibility that the whole book is just words and nothing more. Or an art critic might say the book is painterly, its brilliant surfaces defying a downward gaze. Thus, much is left in the balance, not to be resolved in this book or in life.

This is as far as I can go except to say that I think “Raven Castle” is a masterpiece.

* * *

Portion of a letter, 

shared by permission of Eugene Garber.

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

Charis reviews, new poems, and more

Charis in the World of Wonders reviews

Greg Langley, The Baton Rouge Advocate: 

Young heroine in 'Charis' will captivate readers

23 May 2020

Ben Steelman, The Wilmington StarNews:  

In NC writer’s new novel, the woods are dark, deep and dangerous

16 May 2020

Here's a blog review by Cat Hodge

at Darwin Catholic

And I'm pleased to see Amazon reviews 
by writers and others...

Podcast review

Text clip:  What really makes this novel good is the interior life of the protagonist. She's an interesting character, and with a very rich, beautiful interior monologue... There is a sensitivity of  language; the language is beautiful without being overwrought... It's lovely,  it's captivating, it's beautiful. --Melanie Bettinelli, Raising the Betts podcast #051 (begins 38:25 mark), StarQuest Media Network / sqpn.com

New poems online

Plague-spell

Fantasy in a Time of Chaos

Death of a Singer

Three, including a commissioned pandemic poem... 

Thank you to The Living Church (Episcopal) for requests.

Smalls and Tinies

The next ten months will see ten miniature 

stories or story-like things

at North American Anglican. 

Here's the first: Iolanthe

Videos

Several at The Ballsians 

(youtube channel)

And more at my own site

LOL (lots of links)

A illustration by Galen Dara for one of my stories.

Because certain foreign readers (in countries with some difficulty in affordable book ordering) wanted to read more of my poems and stories, I have updated my record on my Short stories and poems page.

Though I tend to be a bit careless about record-keeping, I've added stories and poems, and I have added a lot of links. I hope that people enjoy some of these...

I've also added a section of what I call Tinies, and that section will have more links as some of these appear--ten will be coming out in the next ten months at North American Anglican.

Note for those who use Bookshop.org: I don't know what's going on with Bookshop, but my books have suddenly become hard to bring up by search there. I'll try and have them sort it out, but in the meantime, you can go directly to my own Bookshop page to search. They don't have all of my in-print books, but there are six: https://bookshop.org/shop/Marly_Youmans. 

Updatery: Red King news

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for The Book of the Red King, 172 pp.
(Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019)

Wee note to encourage the Fool, the Red King, and Precious Wentletrap: Writer Jessica Hooten Wilson (winner of the very big deal, tthe Hiett Prize in the Humanities) has published a review of The Book of the Red King in Fathom. I have updated the page for The Book of the Red King, which now contains an except from her article and helpful comments from: poet and novelist Fred Chappell; reviewer Dan Barnett; poet and novelist Kelly Cherry; longtime editor of Books and Culture, John Wilson; novelist Scott G. F. Bailey; poet and translator Michael Juster; poet and director of Poetry by the Sea, Kim Bridgford; poet Sally Thomas; poet Ray Oliver; poet and novelist Sebastian Doubinsky; and poet Jeffery Beam.

And that parade of names is bright and shiny, a good celebration for the Red King.

All posts about books are the little bottle in Alice's hand that says Drink Me. I hope you will. I promise that you, like Alice, can find that life is surprising and that you may, indeed, change in size, at least on the inside.

A few more images from Clive!

The book is available directly from Phoenicia Publishing 

in hardcover or paperback, and from (pb) Amazon, indies, etc. 

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.

The Book of the Red King as Board Game?

Image pilfered from Paul Pastor's twitter page
 @pauljpastor

A month back, writer Fred Chappell wrote me a long, curious letter about The Book of the Red King, and he suggested a way of looking at the book that I found interesting and enlightening. He talked about puns, sound play, musical language, and many other things, but it's his thoughts about board game and the book that I'm sharing here. I'll back up slightly so I don't miss what he says about the illuminatory accompaniment of Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Such lovely work deserves its accolades!

...the production is handsome, elegant and surprising. Mr. Hicks-Jenkins has done a grand job; his images and designs are in classy harmony with the spirit of the poems--as best as I can read them, anyhow.

I am content that he and [writer] Kelly [Cherry] have made better readings than I. She notes "a difficult and dangerous journey." I was not able to follow the progress of a journey--except through or over time, maybe. I read the volume as a nonsequential sequence and after some fanciful meditation thought of it as a sort of mystical, metaphysical board game with icon pieces: King, Fool, ideal Wentletrap, Alchemist, Flowers, Castle, Garden, and etc. as occasion required or suggested.

The game would be a little like chess and backgammon combined. Each poem is set in a new situation, the positioning of the pieces, their relationship to one another, determined by some shift of inner or outer circumstance. Each new situation requires on the part of Fool or King, a different new mode of perception--rather in the way that any movement of a piece on a chessboard generates and is contained by a new configuration of possible future moves. The Mere Fool sees things differently than does the Twelfth-night Fool; the Mere Fool is in quest of enlightenment; the Twelfth-night Fool experiences an epiphany which is not the result of his quest but which would be unavailable to him without that experience. The King of "Raptures" is very different indeed from the figure in "The Turret Stairs." And of course there are a number of poems in which both King and Fool appear and their perceptions / conceptions of the world are contrasted, though even in these the contrasts are not complete; often, in slant ways, they are complementary. King and Fool undertake very different ways of looking at the world and come (if they do) to very different conclusions, but these are not mutually exclusive--different but complementary, a little like logic and mathematics, perhaps. Although neither of them would be confused with a logician. 

Nor will I, if you have been trying to comprehend this letter.

I have from line to line enjoyed and admired it unflaggingly. For it is as if I traversed a long gallery of separate dramatic moments: stately, antic, thoughtful, gay, gravid, artful, decorative, spontaneous, ritualized, reverent, satiric, learned and almost always to some degree playful. At times I thought, This book is the product of a metaphysician writing a series of comedy sketches. At other times, This is what happens when Pierrot philosophizes as a culture critic.

When I say "decorative" I mean no disrespect. For me Wallace Stevens is a decorative poet but supremely serious also and I might say the same of the paintings of Paul Klee. A lightsome approach can be most revealing--when it is rendered by a deft and practiced hand.

...maybe you can gather some estimate of my admiration and towering respect. This many-colored Paean to Imagination is unmatchable.

I didn't need to put in a bit from the close, but I just love it, naturally enough!

Though I'm not sure where the Red King and the Fool came from, I have to admit that I was deeply influenced as a child by the Alice books. (Two slip-cased volumes were given to me in Louisiana when I was four. The Louisiana of my memory fits neatly with Wonderland.) And they certainly unite a board game and a Red King, and they introduce us to strange gardens, odd courtly figures, puns, and musical language. So Carroll and his strangeness may well (so to speak) be at the very bottom of the book, somehow, and at the bottom of my being. And surely an Alice-child is a sort of Fool, entering another world and trying to decipher it, directed by insufficient knowledge that yet grows as she goes. As a little girl who was made to move every few years all through childhood, I probably had some special affinity with the sensation of tumbling into another world and needing to navigate, and feeling quite, quite foolish.

Thinking about some of my fiction, I remember that I wrote a story about a Red King sleeping... And one of my early stories ends with a child in Collins, Georgia, reaching out her hand to a pier glass, still trusting that the mirror might dissolve under her touch. So: I am clearly guilty of Carroll influence!

As for Fred Chappell's view of a constant new positioning on a kind of metaphysical board, I have no trouble finding that view to be helpful: I always thought of the Red King as a being who was unpinned in meaning. I thought of the Fool as someone who is changing, changing--the book is punctuated by and structured to some degree by the alchemical colors that mark his transformation. And yes, I always felt that the book would be playful, sometimes even when it dealt with terrible things--and surely that links up with the board game idea, the metaphysician comedy, the Pierrot philosophy, and lightsome decoration.

While I can't say that I was pondering board games during the writing, on this very evening I have a date with my three children to play Arkham Horror, a board game set in H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The game has been spread down the length of the dining room table since the last Monday night, when we four (Michael being in India) left our heroes and heroines in a highly dangerous situation. Will we survive? Will we defeat the Ancient Ones? I, you may wish to know, am a man with a long and admirable beard, a seeker who gathers clues and a mystic who wards against evil. Wish me luck in helping to save the world, and be sure and consult The Book of the Red King for a metaphysician's comedy or a Pierrot's philosophy!

[Quotes used by permission.]

November 5th postscript for the curious and lovers of board games: It was a hard struggle, but the Ancient Ones destroyed the world last night.

Writer-readers on The Book of the Red King

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales
Phoenicia Publishing, 2019

I continue to be grateful to novelist Scott G. F. Bailey for his ongoing and perceptive treatment of my work. As a reader, he always enters into a work with a free mind and writes engagingly of what he finds. Now he has written a long blog post about The Book of the Red King; you may read the whole thing HERE, at Six Words for a Hat. I include a few quotes below to entice you to visit.

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"the coming night with its dying-deep 

but dazzling darkness"at Six Words for a Hat

...it is an explication of the life and work of the artist (and possibly in this sense, Yeats' spirit also hovers over the book). Youmans is always powerful when she writes about art and artists, and The Book of the Red King strikes me as her most forceful (and possibly most personal) statement about art (and the artist's purpose) yet. Creativity, rebirth and transfiguration are the threads that stitch The Book of the Red King together...many of its pleasures are easily enjoyed just through the inventiveness of Youmans' characters and the angular, beautiful chemistry of her language.

. . .

He also creates beauty, points to beauty, loves and points to love, grieves and points to grief, is angry and points to anger, etc, all of this being the work of the artist. The Fool, I am telling you, is Marly Youmans (and Yeats and Shakespeare and Milton and let's say Matthew as well, why not). That's my theory; see the first paragraph of this increasingly-staggering little essay. You'll have to draw your own conclusions about the identity of the Red King. Youmans has said of him, "He is all the things he is at once, it seems."

. . .

Because Youmans always writes on a number of levels at once, this essay can only seem to diminish Youmans' artistry by so poorly describing it. I know that poetry has, even at the best of times, a limited audience, but The Book of the Red King deserves readers, and plucky Phoenicia Publishing deserves a reward for being brave enough to market collections that require thoughtful readers. A good deal of current American poetry is merely angry, woke, political, and shallow; or else it's merely pretty, saccharine, and shallow. And while Youmans' book could serve as a text for a contemporary course on the uses of beauty and empathy, she writes for the ages, which I think is in the long run a better idea. I don't know why Marly Youmans isn't much better known, for both her poetry and her novels. She always taps into the substrata of art and life.

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"Marly - salutations" at Tone Deaf

Likewise, I need to thank writer Roderick Robinson for a post about the book at Tone Deaf, in which he offers some favorite quotes and says:

However in my sere, yellow and almost-dropping-off years I write verse. Marly’s good at that except hers is poetry. Red King may emerge as a narrative but in the interim I’m treating her poems as separate entities. Looking for what races my motor. Plenty does. It’s not exactly news but Marly loves words...

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My gratitude, my delight

I'm especially grateful to both Roderick Robinson and Scott Bailey because they have said what they have to say. I've been happy to receive letters of praise for this book from older, better-known writers, but I am deeply grateful to people who talk about my books in public. Because I care deeply about the good of my book, the life of my book in the world. Word of mouth and reviews are precious to a book of poems--and to the Fool.

Hands across enchanted seas

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
vignette on Tomoe River paper
for Charis in the World of Wonders

Often I am asked about what it's like to work--I always think the verb should be dance--with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. He has illuminated and beautified my books for a long time now. I often thought of us as metaphysical twins (I can't remember who first came up with that thought) when we first tumbled into correspondence. The first year of exchanging letters was so inspiring! It's marvelous when you meet a person who inspires you and whom you inspire in turn.

But the image above relates to the sort of small, surprising occurrence that happens when I'm "with" Clive, even if he is across Atlantic in Wales. Sometimes we're walking around in our old houses--Clive's Ty Isaf and my Prentiss Cottage--and pondering each other's work. So magical! And odd things happen as a result. Unexpected elements coalesce. Some are tiny but curious. Like the bird in leaves. A few days ago I told Clive that I had a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign on my bedroom door as a child that reminded me so much of this piece. That's perhaps not wholly surprising, as Clive is using samplers as inspiration, and folk motifs often have some commonality. It seemed an interesting linkage since there is a thread and threat of witchcraft in Charis in the World of Wonders. So the book secretly holds an image that appears protective to me. Of Charis? Of the reader? Of me?

And when I stopped overnight in Middletown, VA on my way north from North Carolina, I had an evening adventure related to the image. I was staying at the 1797 Wayside Inn and went out for a ramble. I stopped by an antique shop that was a log house (built by German settlers who raised eight children there.) Although it was already late, the shop was open. I picked out a few gifts. Outside was a passionate, pleasantly unruly cottage garden, and I learned that there was a bigger garden with winding paths and night-blooming cereus plants and lilies and much more in the back. Though it was growing quite dark, I asked if Crystal (she credited her husband with the garden's design) would show me their garden. The paths were lovely, intermittently lit by solar lamps and huge open moonflowers. And there in the garden I was surprised by a hex sign exactly like the one that had hung on my bedroom door--an image I had not seen in decades--so that a sudden necklace of images flashed into my mind, its beads pilfered from Middletown, Virginia and Cullowhee, North Carolina and Aberystwyth, Wales.

And I guess that's one part of the half-hidden secret of why we like to dance together. Somehow when I'm in a Clivean-Marlyan mode, congruence seems to increase, and not just a congruence of minds. Surprise happens: things happen that suggest that the world is a more enchanted, spark-lit, symbolic place than we commonly know. It's as if we are turning around a hidden center, that we live in a place of abundance. And for moments I'm more congruent with the deep shapes and patterns of the world, and I feel heart-struck and tied in spirit to someone on the other side of the sea.

Log House Antiques and Collectibles in Middletown, Virginia

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HERE's a poem that I wrote about dancing with Clive... 

Novelist Midori Snyder asked me for "Praise for Dark Movements Toy Theatre" for the Journal of Mythic Arts. Although I write mostly formal poetry, I have a whole group of praise poems that draw on a Yoruban form and Hebrew parallelism, and this is one of that sequence. 

The poem has the Mari Lwyd flickering in thorn trees and Yeats in the form of a silver bird and the Starlight Torch and Book of Moon and two friends in a white tent and lots of cheeses! And pie. And of course we dance. Enjoy!

* * *

Eep

I've mentioned Charis, but I'm sure she wants you to be better acquainted with the Red King and the Fool and Precious Wentletrap! It's out there in our Wonderland with a BUY ME Alice-label tied around its pages. So why not skip lunch and support beautiful small presses like Phoenicia Publishing?

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Postscript

So strange to move quickly from summer lands to fall... Today the world looks even more symbolic and enchanted to me, a bright autumn sun streaming through dying red and yellow leaves as if through annealed glass. 

This glorious and transcendent place 

--George Herbert