Sunday, sundry--

Photographs by Mary Morris Youmans.

My Sunday afternoon shenanigans--

By the time you read this, I may well be tootling past the Saratoga battlefield, on my way to summer camp. The mother of three is a perennial ferrywoman... And the youngest child of three is busy, busy, busy.  He has a lot of excess energy to discharge after a year of football, wrestling, hurdling, high jump, and relay.

Why I haven't read your novel yet, and also why if you don't have a novel you should not bother writing one for me because--

I have the  most enormous of all enormous stacks of novels that I have promised to read, all by people I know or e-know. With a life like mine, that appears to have been an insane set of promises. Please read me your book and copy it onto CD, writer friends, so that I can listen to it when I am ferrying. (And while we're at it, tell me why, why, why did I give birth to children who don't give a hoot about learning to drive? The only one who cares is the youngest, but he's 14. Ferrywoman forever!)

I like the sound of this one--

I'm going to have to read Jeffery Donaldson.  He's Canadian! Review here.  I thought Jeffery Beam was the only poet "Jeffery" rather than "Jeffrey." (I also have a brother-in-law who is a "Jeffery.") Donaldson is yet another neurologically interesting poet, too. Nothing like loosened brain wiring to help us out!

You poets out there, pondering where to send--

I sent to Pirene's Fountain for the first time, and I must say they are boomerang masters! They're right up there in the top ten fastest returned answers ever. I sent them something late at night and found the decision in my box when I looked this morning.  (So I now have 50 Red King poems coming out or recently out. I need to send more, need to polish more, need to find hours more.) More and more I like webzines because nothing else can match the number of readers.

What mac should I get, and what frills should I get?

I'm still pondering that question, having a generous-hearted mother who says I should no longer have such a piece of  *&%#! as this thing I type on... Left to its own accursed devices, it leaves out many letters when I type fast. It also practices cursor-leaping, in which the cursor zooms to a new spot for no good reason whatsoever, so that if one is not watching, a great muddle is made. Gary says a MacBook Air, and I think that a good idea.

More "The Book of the Red King" poems

Two tales of the Fool, "The Yellow Day" and "The Silver Cord," are up at Lucid Rhythms, edited by poet and  fiction writer David Landrum.

Dreaming, hand-in-hand with François Houtin

This little post mailed to the universe at large doesn’t really need to be anything but an arrow pointing to François Houtin and Galleria del Leone. I’m not sure how I survived in the world so long without knowing his intricate etchings that have all the rightness of dreams and sometimes remind me of something he must have seen by looking through one of those fey stones with a hole worn through the middle. His etchings are half Earth, half Faerie, half Heaven—unlocking vista on vista through arches and shapes that give way onto marvelous lightening skies. And yes, I know that makes three halves. It would take that many to make up the whole of Houtin.

I love his little garden structures that seem to have grown from some mossy nook, wherever that green dream earth might be found. If I close my eyes and wish hard, perhaps one will seed itself on my back lawn, next to the birch that springs out of an apple stump.

And he’s young as printmakers go—only 61, it seems, and that means time for more dreams. For an instant, looking through the arch of a crumbling ruin onto a vista that slides back forever, you might think him quite as old as Piranesi! I can imagine that Steve Cieslawski likes his work… Houtin has interesting kindred but is quite himself and wonderfully obsessive, it appears, and I am always drawn to the obsessive--those who find "a fire was in my head." That multitude of tiny leaves! The delicacy and intricacy of his dreams! The radiance of skies at the back of his arches and the wonderful eye-peeps drawing our gaze onward and onward from here to mystical there...

I, having the lavish freedom of the mind, shall imagine Houtin as a sort of wandering Aengus, who composes his own "hollow lands and hilly lands" and then passes into them, seeking to catch what "faded in the brightening air." And surely if we can only clamber over the sill of a frame and into one of his etchings, we can "pluck till time and times are done / the silver apples of the moon, / the golden apples of the sun."

How glad I am, François Houtin, that you spent all those hours scratching at a wax ground with your etching needle! True metal and other worlds lay underneath, all the time.

In a mere eye-twinkle you may flit to Galleria del Leone and see many more Houtin etchings in dizzy, heaped-up profusion, along with dream-like titles and a bit of information about the artist and each picture. Here are are few mysteries to entice:

Pilfered from facebook--Laura Murphy Frankstone & "The Throne of Psyche"

Illustrations in this post:  a peek at Laura's paintings at her beautiful site, Laurelines. If you don't know it, you should! She is an artist who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (a place where I have lived three times in my life, and where my youngest child was born.) Oddly, I met her after I moved to Cooperstown, New York. Poet Jeffery Beam introduced me to her site years ago.

Marly Youmans' 'The Throne of Psyche'

by Laura Murphy Frankstone on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 4:26pm.

Just closed the covers of Marly Youmans' gorgeous new book of poems, 'The Throne of Psyche,' and, gosh, it was hard coming to again, on this hot July day. Here there're no freshets, no dryads. No one here uses words like auroral or boreal or louse-pickage. Truth told here doesn't pack a smart punch like Marly's. Ineffable, here, hardly ever happens. But there... oh, yes. I only meant to dip into the book for now, but once in, there was no way out but through. My advice to you: buy this book and read it. Poetry, in THIS world, needs all the support it can get. And, oh, that Clive HIcks-Jenkins cover---a brooding mix of Ucello, Thomas Hart Benton, and Chagall. Sublime.

The Throne of Psyche at Amazon
The Throne of Psyche at Powell's (indie)
The Throne of Psyche at your local independent bookshop (pick a store)
The Throne of Psyche direct from Mercer University Press
The Throne of Psyche at barnesandnoble.com.