Manuscript critique

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Who will read my manuscript?
This little gang of editors and writers was formed especially for the people who write and ask me to critique their manuscripts, and for those who ask for recommendations on how to find an editor. I have done some manuscript critiques for others (particularly friends-of-friends and locals) in the past but don't have time to do that now.  I hope this collection of people who critique and edit will help if you are looking for feedback on a book manuscript or screenplay.

Genres, experience, expense
Most of the people on the list handle fiction and nonfiction, but some deal with YA, screenwriting, and poetry as well. My recommendation is that you look closely at the links; the editors are quite varied in experience and interests, and some of them might just feel like a fit for you. I expect there may be a range in the pesky matter of expense as well; I've listed fees where easily available. If this helps you narrow down to a few editors, please google them and see what else you can find.

Investigate
When you read about someone who has worked in the publishing industry, see what they have edited. In the case of editors who are also published writers--as many here are--don't forget that you can often go to Amazon and read a portion of a book. Excerpts and reviews may be on other sites as well. Google is your friend. This is especially helpful with those who do not have a website. Most of the names here are based on a facebook query; if you want to look at the responses (some of which have personal recommendations and more information), they are here.

Recommendations, prose and poetry
I have included the novelist or poet who recommended each person, except when e-friends contacted me directly. Though I've focused on prose, there are a good many no-fee sites where you can share and discuss poems--perhaps the most rarefied being Eratosphere, which concentrates primarily on formal poetry.

Grow the list
Please feel free to add further names and information in the comments. I will be adding any others that come in via email and facebook. And if you use one of the editors, come back and leave a comment.

Thanks to Diane
Oh, and Diane Ducey deserves credit for writing a lovely letter that prompted me to make this list. Good luck to her!

MIKE LEVINE
About Mike Levine Editorial: here
Write Mike Levine on the MLE contact page: here
Recommended by poet and translator Alicia Stallings

JACKIE COOPER
jkershawcooper [at] aol [dot] com
About Jackie Cooper: here
Note: He will not review any book he critiques. (He reviews for Huffington Post.)
Fee for a novel critique: $400.

CAREY WALLACE
About Carey Wallace: here
theblindcontessa [at] gmail [dot] com
Fees worked out on a case by case basis.

LAURA AGIRI
silver [dot] graph [at] juno [dot] com
Laura has published novels and collections of stories
   and has worked as researcher, editor, and writer.

JEN VIOLI
About Jen Violi: here
Write Jen on her contact page: here
Recommended by writer Alice Marks

PETERNELLE VAN ARSDALE
About Peternelle Van Arsdale: here
peternelle [at] peternellevanarsdale [dot] com
YA, novel, fantasy
Recommend by novelist Jeff Giles

CINDY KANE / CINDY TRUMBORE
About Cindy Kane: here
Cindy [at] cindykane.net
Children's books and YA
Recommended by poet Julie Kane

JANET NAYLOR VANDENABEELE
Ink Stains Media: here
janetvan [at] gmail [dot] com

JULIE SCHEINA
About Julie Scheina: here
julie [at] juliescheina [dot] com
Recommended by novelist April Lindner

NEIL AITKEN
About Neil Aitken's work with poets and writers: here
Contact page here
Recommended by poet Robbi Nester

S. J. HODGES
Memoirs, self-help, fiction
About S. J. Hodges: here
Around $500 for a read with notes session, depending on length
She sends science and business mss. to LEIGH ANNE HIRSCHMAN
    at Hirschman Literary

MARGARET DIEHL
About Margaret Diehl: here, here
margaret [dot] diehl [at] gmail [dot] com

KAREN PALMER
About Karen Palmer: here
karenpalm [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

MELANIE BISHOP
About Melanie Bishop: here
leximelanie [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

JOAN ROGERS
to be added
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

Thanks to novelist Emily Barton for more recommendations,
   though they turned out to be overbooked. How busy
   an editor is just might be something to consider as well.

IMAGE
The Manuscript Critique: "$695 for up to six months of mentoring."
Writer and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson suggested
   both IMAGE's book service and IOWA BOOK DOCTORS.
   I haven't found enough information on the latter, but feel free to investigate further!

FREE FACEBOOK WRITERS GROUP
"Anyone may submit passages of written work for group critiques."
Find other writers who want to swap manuscripts for comments at any stage...
Recommended by Kim Beall, who says she found a few trolls but also
   some helpful friends. (Kim just sold her first book.)

FREE CRITTERS is a free service for writers of sf/f/h, though you have to critique
   other pieces before you take a turn with your own. So you "pay" with your
   time and thoughts. I talked to someone who used the service, and he was
   enthusiastic about one critiquer out of five.

2 at 8: Angle

Angle 8, edited by UK poets Ann Drysdale and Philip Quinlan (with web mastery by poet Peter Bloxsom), is now up. The issue is full of interesting poets drawn to form, including Claudia Gary, Kate Bernadette Benedict, Norman Ball, R. Nemo Hill, Mary Meriam, Anna M. Evans, Charlotte Innes, Janet Alexa Kenny, Alan Wickes, Maryann Corbett, Deborah Warren, David M.Katz, Catherine Chandler, Kevin Durkin, John Whitworth, Jeff Holt, David Wayne Landrum, Jennifer Reeser, Marybeth Rua-Larsen, Siham Karami, Rick Mullin, Ed Shacklee, Terese Coe, John Foy, and more. (Hat tip to Claudia, as I lifted the list from her Facebook post, rather than industriously cobbling it together on my own.) The archive is here.

Two of my poems may be found in the issue. One is "Dread," lodged in the second half of the issue. I wrote that one after reading some translations from Robert Walser, but it's also under the sway of late winter in Cooperstown, a time in which a Southerner (and perhaps even a born-and-bred Yankee) begins to believe that the White Witch of Narnia might really hold sway and that winter will not end: "...No little wood stove witch / Is opening a door on burning souls,  / No evil but the dread you wear like skin / Is muttering your name in conjure tones."

The other finds a place in the middle section of the issue, Arsy-Versy: Ekphrastic Supplement. That one, "Parque Forestal," was jotted in a pocket notebook while traveling in South America last fall; the park, a wonderful and various city greenspace, follows the Mapocho river in Santiago, Chile. I stumbled on a monument to Rubén Darío, his "name / Mingled with drops and stone and evergreens / And dawn as yellow as a daffodil."

The easiest way to find them in the .pdf file? Go to the table of contents and click on the page number by my name for "Dread" and by the name of the supplement for "Parque Forestal"--and then scroll down four pages--but I recommend a wander through the issue.

X, with squirrels

Yeats, Poems, 1899
Design by Althea Gyles

A memory of a famous author just floated by. I'll call him "X." He had come to visit a poetry workshop of grad students and undergrads. I was there, and curious; I knew that X was sometimes mentioned as headed for a Nobel.

The first thing he did was to shred a poem by a freshman into something else entirely: burning fire slaw, perhaps, or poisonous confetti. She was a pleasant young woman, and she had written a poem about a squirrel. The subject met disapproval. No doubt the poem needed shredding, and perhaps there are instances when a fine, fierce shredding can be salutary. I fear this one was not. It seemed a rather loveless incident. I couldn't help imagining or discerning (which?) that there was a desire to obliterate the young woman--a girl still, she seems, a child in memory. I can dimly conjure her face, and some of the grad students smirking and exchanging glances in what must have been satisfaction. I doubt that such pleasure is good for human beings of either sex. Their poems were, in fact, better--they were young men who, after all, were four to ten years older than she was--and received a modicum of praise.

What surprises me in the memory is my attitude. I was a sophomore and didn't have a poem in the batch being considered that night. While sympathetic to the plight of the unfortunate, upset freshman, I remember wishing hard that a poem of mine had been up for consideration. It seemed to me that I would not be easily torn to pieces. And if ripped and my limbs scattered, I would be quite able to put myself back together. Or so I believed.

I feel a little strange, recalling the young person who was me, so secretly confident and determined. Perhaps one needs to be so inwardly bold in order to pursue the craft of words in our time. But I can't remember if I thought of "To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-gno" from The Wild Swans at Coole, and how a squirrel runs "through the shaking tree." Did I recall "An Appointment," which finds Yeats turning from the being "out of heart" with government to the leapings and delight of a squirrel (Responsibilities and Other Poems.) Did I volunteer that Yeats, whose poems I loved, had not been too grand and proud to write a poem about a squirrel, and not only once?

I hope so.

Kyle-na-gno is one of the seven woods of Coole... Yeats names them in the dedication to Lady Gregory in The Shadowy Waters:

Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond
Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;
Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-gno,
Where many hundred squirrels are as happy
As though they had been hidden by green boughs,
Where old age cannot find them; Pairc-na-lea,
Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths;
Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling
Their sudden fragrances on the green air;
Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes
Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;
Dim Inchy wood, that hides badger and fox
And marten-cat, and borders that old wood
Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood:
Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.

We move from shade to sun, from Kyle-dortha to Kyle-na-gno. There's a poet watching, but no chance of a workshop. Kyle-na-gno means "the nut wood" or "the hazel wood." No wonder so many squirrels are happy there in a flourishing green, hid from death and change. 

Jeffery Beam, "Beyond the Green Door"

Jeffery Beam, reading and singing--listen up, world! In our culture, poets tend to be invisible, but here's a good look at Jeffery. Links below.



"This [3-part] reading offers a range of poetry, songs, and reflections from Jeffery Beam’s career – from the age of 17 to the present – as well as poems and songs from others, to illuminate his life-long conversation with the Divine in Nature. A troubadour poet, he is the author of over 20 works of poetry and sung poems in books and CDs, and is a photographer, editor, and critic. The reading was part of the Faith and the Arts series at St Matthews Episcopal Church, Hillsborough, North Carolina. Recorded October 18, 2015."

Four recent books by Beam at Lady Word of Mouth: http://ladywordofmouth.blogspot.com/…/four-recent-books-by-  Jeffery's website at UNC: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/ More poems by Jeffery, picked by former NC poet laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer of Cullowhee, here: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/…/poet-of-week-jeffery-b

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

Phoenicia, April sale, and Elizabeth Adams

Bookplates by Elizabeth Adams

Here's a little bit about Phoenicia Publishing and the current poetry-month sale, text drawn from The Cassandra Pages, the blog site of Elizabeth Adams.

All the full-length books are on sale, including Annunciation and How Many Roads?

Bookplates and prints are also for sale in the new Store on the website. Hope you'll take a look.

You know, I feel so fortunate to be able to work with the authors and artists whose work we have published. I wish I could bring out more books each year but it's just too difficult - this is basically a one person operation, with some generous help in certain areas from my partner, and it's time-consuming and costly, while being extremely rewarding from all other points of view. I know a lot of you have supported this endeavor over the years and this is a chance to say, again, thank you - both from me and from the authors themselves.

I love what Dave Bonta wrote on Facebook when he shared the announcement: "These are all good. Some are down-right great. (I know because I have read all of them.)" That's about the most straight-forward recommendation I can imagine!

Beth Adams is a stellar publisher with many talents, including wonderful design work, a thing often missing in new books. She works hard, and I'm hoping that word of mouth is kind to her press--if you're an admirer of Phoenicia, why not write some Amazon reviews, post about the press (feel free to copy anything in this post) and its books, or simply tell people you know? And of course, the purchase of a book sends a message to the publisher that says you support the kind of work she is doing and hope she will keep adding to the sum of what's worth cherishing in the world. Being a small-scale publisher is not easy, and I am glad that Beth continues to make beautiful books.

The new Phoenicia store has the book plates above, as well as some lovely prints from the Annunciation anthology. Take a look!

Why not sign up for the newsletter?

*

And see the complete catalogue of books and music here.

April sale. Books shown are the Annunciation anthology,
poetry by Rachel Barenblat, Claudia Serea, Luisa Igloria,
Magda Kapa, and me, and Jonathan Sa'adah's
photographs from the 60's and early 70's.

You may also visit Studio Cassandra at Etsy
to find Beth's watercolors, prints, pastels, and more.

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. 

Wishing for Randall Jarrell

I've been thinking about Randall Jarrell, one of the poets I knew well as a child--I had a copy of The Complete Poems in high school (soon after it appeared--thank you, mother-librarian!) and knew them well at that time. He wrote in many different genres, and so I trailed after him into novel, children's books, and criticism. I believe his was the first criticism I enjoyed. I've been thinking about how strongly he felt about about the changes in culture, back in the 1950's, and how much of what he says could only be repeated or made stronger now. He was certain very able to empathize with the person (or the bat) who was lonely and desperate, longing for more in life and for change. ("Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!") And he thought that a poet's role was, in part, braving and living up to the lonesome idea that being misunderstood might be part of the call: "If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries, you will never look just right to posterity. Every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

Here's a comment from Suzanne Ferguson that shows how critical Jarrell was about the trajectory of cultural change. (Elsewhere, he lamented, "The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced."*)

The magnitude of what had been lost in American culture reaffirmed for Jarrell "the final, important, intense value" of art, of poetry for making sense of that loss. Paradoxically, his depression about the political climate, the devaluation of art in a consumer culture, and the plight of undereducated, oversocialized*** children created a need for him to write the tales, the now-classic children's books, and the late poetry in which he gives voice to the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people trying to transform their lives that are "commonplace and solitary." More and more it is the strength of this last creative work, after a struggle with what he saw as "ominous" changes in "the climate of our culture" (Sad Heart 86)*, that makes Jarrell a central figure in mid-century letters, one who cannot be relegated to the margins, where off "in a bright spot somewhere in the corner / Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth" (CP 333).* --from Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co: Middle-generation Poets in Context

*A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.
**The Complete Poems
***Somewhere he complains about American children being raised on applause, rather like current complains of an "everybody gets a prize" sort of schooling.

There's a grand bouquet of flowers to chose from when we think about American poets. But who is the most important critic in the states? It might be Eliot, though he left us. Or Auden, who is ours and not ours. But it just might be Randall Jarrell. I hope we grow some more poet-writer-critics of his kind.

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
            --from "A Girl in a Library"

You Asked, no. 16: Poetry in our day

R. T. (Tim)10:54 AM, March 15, 2016 I'm going to be bold (and I hope not rude) by making a comment (observation) and asking a question. (1) I've known a few poets in the past half century, and I've been impressed by their commitment even though their reading audience seems to be painfully small; (2) How can poetry now in the 21st century ever grow beyond its self-contained audience (usually academics, other poets, and a smattering of others) and become more commonly read by more people? Perhaps neither my observation nor my question are worthy of your attention. I'm just thinking out loud.

Not only is the audience for poetry small, the academic-realm support for the kind of poetry I want to write is even smaller--that is, I want to write something that is not a free verse lyric poem with a bit of narrative. I want to write in forms, sometimes old and forgotten forms. I want to use all the tools of Puttenham's "arte of English poesy" that were lost in time or laid down in Modernism. Occasionally I do something that looks like free verse, as when I fooled around with poems inspired by Yoruban chant. But it's still a running after shapeliness. For the most part, the academy isn't interested in such things, so that leaves me with the "smattering of others." (A large number of poets are ensconced in the academy, so I can't count so much on those other poets you mention.)

But I happen to think that a lot of the most exciting possibilities in poetry mean chasing the past and making it work for today. That's part of why I pursued a long epic adventure in Thaliad. (Interestingly,  that 2012 book still trickles along in sales, a narrow runnel but not yet stopped.)

I want the past--which contemporary scholars are busy ousting from our best schools--to go along with me. Get an English major without a jot of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton? It happens. Spin poetry out of your navel instead of out of the rich gold of the past? Lack a proper humility in standing before the masters? It happens.

Little springlike shoots, desires for tradition and its magic and powers are cropping up in all the arts, I expect. In painting, somebody like Makoto Fujimura, painting in the Nihongan traditions, calls for culture care and the creation of beauty out of the ashes of destruction, a gift to the wounded and dehumanized soul. A devoted follower of the Old Masters like Jacob Collins says, “Those people who never lose sight of beauty and power are attractive. I’m trying to make things beautiful in a deep way. Poetic. Transformative. Mysterious.” A good number of my friends who paint, even when they are clearly children of Modernism, have embraced narrative and sometimes figurative work. Many of them seem like bridges between one thing and another, and some have moved (I'm thinking of Victoria Adams in particular) from something near abstraction to an enchanted realism.

The great transcendentals, beauty, truth, and goodness, are returning to us in various ways, though there are many who fight against their elemental powers. At times, they feel fresh and alive with energy once more.

You suggest that numbers in poetry are a problem. I am not so sure, though it certainly would be lovely to have more readers. Many a press has foundered over poetry's small sales. The "sugar'd sonnets of Shakespeare, among his private friends" were passed by hand (Francis Meres, 1598.) Later on, we know that Donne's poems were circulated this way, as were the works of many others. A small, beautiful work like Chidiock Tichbourne's "Elegy," written before his execution, may well have been dependent upon a single hand-written copy, though the poem soon made it into a book. Poems have survived their times despite small readership.

Was there ever a mythical age when all the world knew poetry? Perhaps not since the days of oral recitation by the fire, if then. What can we do? Well, schools could focus more on memorization and recitation and appreciation instead of dissection. (Need a written school assignment? Translate a sixteenth-century sonnet into your own words. Or write a sonnet, and then look at it two weeks later. Time tells all.) But how much needs to be done? I don't even know. I expect we might be surprised by meeting people in seemingly un-poetic occupations who read poetry--perhaps not contemporary poetry, but poetry all the same. Certainly it was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. And today there are elements of poetry in popular slams, rap, song. Do those lead young people on to better work? I have no idea. Maybe not.  But I'm not fond of the idea of shoving poetry down people's throats as if poetry were an intellectual castor oil.

Makoto Fujimura would say that culture belongs to all of us, and it is our responsibility to share what's beautiful and good. Surely that is true, and one thing we all can do is talk about the poems and books and art we love. I buy art, mostly by friends, and I buy books that I want to support. Often they sit a long time before I read them because I am busy with deadlines, but I buy them anyway because I know a purchase is an encouragement to the writer and an assurance to the publisher. The most destructive thing to a book is, after all, to be ignored. And some degree of that is the fate of most books, poetry or not. How could it be otherwise when only some minute percent of all writers are self-supporting, and when publishers choose and push the lead books of fiction and nonfiction?

Perhaps there's some lovely good in the idea that the best poetry, even in its loneliness and neglect, resists the current world where art is an expensive widget often fettered to ideology, where commercialism is god, and where utilitarian pragmatism rules. Perhaps that small, burning lamp--a gift to the world that mostly looks away--will continue to call to itself those who love the high play of language. Perhaps that readership will grow. As Mako says, art offers "our dying culture unfading bouquets, gifts of enduring beauty that we do not want to refuse." Poesy as posy: I, too, wonder who will accept that gift, those flowers.

News from poetry land--

Cover art and design by Elizabeth Adams

Logan, revising the world

Occasionally I read an article that seems so congruent with my own thoughts that I am naturally--human nature being the naughty thing it is--drawn to think it marvelous. This morning I'm feeling very pleased with William Logan's Poetry: Who Needs It? (Hat tip to Prufrock News.) Although the thought of poet William Logan with his reviewer's shears in hand can be terrifying, he is sharp (natural to grasper of shears!) and amusing. He's good here on the state of the culture, the place of poetry, and poetry in the schools. And he invokes Auden's daydream college for bards.

Chitterings of Earl the Squirrel 

Speaking of feisty writers on poetry... I had no idea that a talkative, over-opinionated gray squirrel had started a poetry blog. Evidently he has a sister, Pearl. She is, as you might guess, also Squirrel, family Sciuridae. You can enjoy the nine most asinine things Earl the squirrel has heard poets say, and then noodle around in the obstreperous little fellow's posts. He wields compliments as well as skewers, though his compliments often make implicit demands: "William Shakespeare understood that, in order to survive, verse needed to be meaningful, entertaining and adroit."

Question

Here's a question for Puttenham nuts, trope nuts, poetry nuts--somewhere in The Arte of English Poesie is a trope he calls "the traveller," unless I am making that one up. I thought it might be anastrophe. But I don't think so now... I'm regretting that the book was in one of the 25 boxes of books I once had to leave behind in a move because I'm not proving quick at finding what I want in the online version. Anybody know, right off the bat?

Last day for pre-orders, Night Willow

If you want Phoenicia Publishing's pre-order price for Luisia Igloria's Night Willow, better order by midnight! Take a look at the Phoenicia catalogue while you're there.

Kurp on Mehigan

Patrick Kurp (I recommend his blog, Anecdotal Evidence) has written an interesting review of Joshua Mehigan's second book. (h/t Prufrock.)

Mehigan’s most valuable gifts as a poet are his ability to maintain impersonal distance and remain indifferent to fashion without repudiating tradition. The sociologist Edward Shils might be referring to Mehigan when he writes: “The beginning writer seeks a tradition until he finds one or several and then begins to develop his own style; but he must be a person of great courage and perseverance to disregard the traditions which are proffered to him and insisted upon by teachers, contemporaries, friends, critics, and publishers.” As a poet, Mehigan has passed through apprenticeship and is thriving as a journeyman working toward mastery.

Note from the snow village--

Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins in my Thaliad
(dual hc/pb, Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)

I've just read Tim Parks's post in the NYRB blog, "Writing to Win," and am feeling amused. It seems that I hardly qualify as a novelist at all because I do not feel in the least that writing is a competition, and I have no compulsion to "win" against others. It's a lot more pleasing to help other writers than to trip them up and race off. In fact, I have no sense of wishing to be "better" than others in terms of numbers, which don't tell us a lot about whether a book is any good. It's not that I don't want to have readers; I do. Books aren't complete without readers. But numbers are always less than the desire to make novels and stories and poems full of energy and truth, grace and beauty.

Is it because I am a woman and lack literary testosterone that I have no fever to elbow aside other writers in some imaginary race? Is it because I am a busy woman who is on the tail end of raising three children? Certainly the post makes writing novels sound like a boy's game. Is it because I live in a remote place, and as a Southerner practically hibernate in the winter, so that I lack concern for being visible? (No, I'm not going out until the snows melt! Or at least until child no. 3's next wrestling meet. Brr. It's later today.) Is it because I began my writing life as a poet in a time when poetry book publication was limited, and so didn't expect a book immediately? Perhaps all novelists should be forced to start out in a landscape where publication is difficult, the snows are long, and the place obscure. It might calm them down a little.

It occurs to me that I live the most ordinary life possible. People in my little Yankee village know me as my husband's wife, my children's mother, or as Marly--most of them don't even know my writing surname, my birth name. They're more likely to ask me the date when my husband gets back from Kyrgyzstan (and if it's a man I'm talking to, he may say I'm the best wife in the world because my husband is off adventuring in Kyrgyzstan) or how my children are doing than to ask me what I'm writing. My friends who are painters and writers in the area and some others do know, of course, and we get together and talk about art and books and children and travels and so on.

Oh, there are articles in the local paper, but few people make the connection. My audience and my events tend to be elsewhere, though I do readings or talks for the village library or school and visit the occasional local book club from time to time. My closest non-village readings were in the nearest large town until the bookstore there decided that having readings "wasn't fair" to some others who couldn't bring in sufficient audience and dropped the series. So now most of my book activity is at a good distance from home.

I like this life; it's helpful being a member of a community and involved in various group activities. By the lights of those Tim Parks talks about in his essay, that leaves me out of the winner's circle. "It's a competition," he says of them. Luckily I aspire to something else entirely . . . and so am not downcast.

Word-doodling

Wandering around the labyrinth of Arts and Letters Daily over morning tea, I found a Sara Lodge review of Daniel Levin Becker's Many Subtle Channels--it's more like a feature piece, and is a sort of introduction to the fascinating word-twisters of OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Since I spent my afternoon and evening at a long track meet, I felt a bit frivolous and immediately started playing with the beau présent, which Lodge defines this way: "A beau présent, meanwhile, is a poem that contains only the letters in the recipient’s name. Writing one for Malcolm X would thus pose a challenge."

I used my writer's name, Marly Youmans, rather than my full name, just to limit the exercise further. Try one! (And if you do, leave it or a link to it in the comments.)

A May Lay
Marly Youmans beau présent

You, a man, say, marl--
You, ram-Rama-Ramayama--
You, Mara, Mary, Lou--
You, lars or Lars--

Nary a you--
You, many.

And what about Malcolm X being a challenge? Why not take a stab at it?

LOL Mall
Malcolm X beau présent

Loco, all-mal mall?
Loco lox loom?
All-loco ox?

Mmm.
O, calm,
O, cool--

Loco XOXO, ma'am.
Loco LOL.

Dream schooling

Here's Auden by way of Alan Jacobs. It has been a very long time since I read The Dyer's Hand, and this excerpt is wonderful and rather impossible, given how our schools are structured. I like the focus on memorization, language, and finding a job that has little to do with writing. And I might just consider what my dream schooling would be, given the constraints of current education and times.

One of the unused images by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
made for The Foliate Head poetry collection
from Stanza Press in the UK, 2012.
The green man is an evocative image
of exuberance and natural abundance and,
I think, a good image for a poet.

 “

In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:

(1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

(2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.

(3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.

(4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.

(5) every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.

A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn his living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words. At one time, children training to become rabbis were also taught some skilled manual trade, and if only they knew their child was going to become a poet, the best thing parents could do would be to get him at an early age into some Craft Trades Union. Unfortunately, they cannot know this in advance, and, except in very rare cases, by the time he is twenty-one, the only nonliterary job for which a poet-to-be is qualified is unskilled manual labor. In earning his living, the average poet has to choose between being a translator, a teacher, a literary journalist or a writer of advertising copy and, of these, all but the first can be directly detrimental to his poetry, and even translation does not free him from leading a too exclusively literary life.

”W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand

New judging stint--

 
The Aldrich Press Poetry Award 2013

Deadline: May 31, 2013.
The winner will be announced on October 1st 2013.  

Winner receives a print publication, 12% royalties off Amazon sales, $200.00 and 50 free books (a retail value of $700.00). Finalists will also be considered for publication. 

Final judge: Marly Youmans 

Initial screening by Aldrich Press editor, Karen Kelsay.

More information here.

The Next Big Thing - author meme

Lovely poet friend Luisa Igloria invited me to join the self-interview experiment called The Next Big Thing. Writers participating get to answer 8-10 questions, and then tag five other writer friends to post their own “next big thing” the following Wednesday. I'll add a list of the writers later.

1. What is the working title of your book?

In 2012, my ninth, tenth, and eleventh books came out--a thing that, combined with a stint as judge for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature, seems and was insanity.

The first was a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction (Mercer University Press.) This book combines various threads from family lore into a new fabric of adventure. Soon it will be out in paperback.

Then came a collection of formal poetry, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press), wonderfully decorated with green man art by my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins. It hasn't been out long but is a limited edition.

And last is December's Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing) a post-apocalyptic narrative in blank verse, centering on seven children who leave home.

So 2012 saw three books in three genres in three countries. As Thaliad is the most recent, I will focus on it. (Upcoming books: Catherwood will be back in print; Glimmerglass; and Maze of Blood.)

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

In July of 2010, the story simply appeared in the curious corridors of my brain. I never expected to publish the poem as a book (an epic poem? in 2012?) but wrote entirely for my own pleasure. I published a section of the fourth part in qarrtsiluni, and afterward received the surprise of several requests to publish based on the excerpt. (Another fragment of the poem appeared in Kim Bridgford's Mezzo Cammin.) One was from Elizabeth Adams (managing editor of quarrtsiluni with Dave Bonta), and I decided she was the most appropriate publisher. And I like her Phoenicia Publishing. In fact, if you don't know her small press, please go take a look.

3. What is the genre of the book?

Blank verse poetry that hews to epic conventions, translated into our day. Some novelistic conventions.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Why should a book be a movie? That is the proper question. Because for once a mid-list writer might make a living? Because people don't read poetry?

Unknown child actors, for the most part.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

If I had wanted it to be one-sentence long, I would have written it so!

Their world destroyed, seven children fare forth to make a new world? Children build a matriarchal world in the face of natural-world and human violence after devastation? The long effort to build something of beauty and meaning in the face of catastrophe?

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency/publisher?

Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal. Owned by that native New Yorker, Elizabeth Adams, designer and artist and writer and more.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote it in an intense burst through July and into the beginning of August. Then I fiddled a long time.

8. What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?

I am going to have to take that one as a question about artistic debt, since I don't think the book is like much contemporary work. No doubt I would never have written such a poem if I had never read the Anglo-Saxon poets, the Gawain poet, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Logue, and others. A reader versed in poetry may detect some homage to Homer, the Anglo-Saxons, Milton, and Cavafy. And though it is post-apocalyptic, I would say that the narrative owes a bigger debt to a passion for fairy tales than to an interest in, say, the current spate of post-apocalyptic novels. I am afraid that I have read none of them, aside from those read in 2012 while on the NBA judging panel, and that was too late to influence Thaliad.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It blossomed in my head. No doubt the reading mentioned above made a difference. I also have a fondness for blank verse. Every time I try to add a sentence about why, it sounds downright erotic. Flexible. Pleasurable. Easy-to-muscular rhythms.

10. What else about your book/your writing might pique the reader’s interest?

Thaliad is a spectacularly beautiful object, from the jacket or cover to the framing full-page illustrations to the title page to the wealth of gorgeous vignettes by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. The design by Elizabeth Adams is immaculate. The profuse art that decorates the pages subtly adds to the narrative.