"The Book of the Red King" poems at Pirene's Fountain

Three new poems from The Book of the Red King are up today at Pirene's Fountain:  "Blue Sky, Blue Tree," "The Yoke," and "Fool's Talismans." My penpal Corey Mesler also has poems in this issue.

"Travellers and Magicians"

Movie recommendations: a grand movie to watch on a slow Sunday afternoon. I loved the nesting of the stories--one inside another inside another--and the infinitely slow unfolding that is a slap in the face and a reproof to Hollywood. The second film by the Bhutanese director, lama, and abbot Khyentse Norbu is Travellers and Magicians, the first movie made entirely in Bhutan (1993.) Khyentse Norbu ignored professional actors and gave us a cast that includes "the chief regulator of the country's banking and financial institutions, a colonel in the King's Bodyguard, a monk trained in pure mathematics, a senior researcher with the government strategic planning think tank, employees of the local TV broadcasting corporation, a school principal, school children and farmers." Like Bhutan, the outer story's main character has a foot in two very different worlds . . . as does the main character of the inmost story.

Leaves in our hair--

I'm afraid that life has been a bit too busy lately. But I have been moving forward despite the dragons and rocks and pits in the path. One maiden has been rescued, a new chariot acquired post-Irene, and much late-night oil burned.  I turned in the page proofs of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I read Thaliad entirely too many times and then finally tossed in the final version, my fingers crossed that I did not introduce any errors accidentally into the text (start thinking that way and then the number of reads becomes infinite!) Next I wrote a review of Bei Dao's selected poems, even though I know no Chinese--a great handicap, I am afraid--and sent that off yesterday.

And now I doing a  last polish on The Foliate Head so that I can give the final version to Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Andrew Wakelin. Andrew designed Clive's two smashingly beautiful books for his 60th birthday retrospective at The National Library of Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and now he is going to work with us out of the considerable goodness of his heart, using the Stanza Press template. So we are doing our own thing instead of relying on the press entirely. And that will be quite interesting and fruitful, I think. We do need to make it "look" like a Stanza Press book, but we can do our own version. I'm very glad that Pete Crowther asked me for a poetry manuscript, and that he and designer Mike Smith are letting us fool around with the book. Frolics ahead!

The division pages of foliate heads are already done (if you attended Clive's retrospective at The National Library of Wales, you may remember them.) Clive will also do a cover image. It will be a hardcover book with the image printed directly on smooth boards. Although Stanza is not an "artists' books" press, I think it will be a highly collectible item as well as beautiful.

The poems have all appeared somewhere or other, a great many of them by request--I like being asked, as I am lazy in the area of submission. Energetic elsewhere, but lazy there. I find it rather like laundry. You wash, you dry, you fold... Enough! It's done. Who feels like putting the stacks away?

The book is divided into three parts: Powers, The Book of Ystwyth, and The Green World. And it is made up of formal poems: narratives, lyrics, monologues, blank verse, sonnet, couplets, Burmese climbing rhyme, the form of Puck's Song, nonce forms, even a poem in Renaissance poulter's measure. Like contemplating the leafy energy of the world, strange powers, beauty (the poems I wrote for Clive's retrospective are here), and transformation? Then you may want one of these special little books-to-be!

The Psyche Sampler

For a poetry book, The Throne of Psyche is fairly long--at 106 pages, it's roughly double the average book of poems. Let's see; that's 60 poems, counting the seven sections of the title poem. If you would like to take a big bite of the book to see whether you want your very own copy, you may write me. Then you can see whether you want to loll in the grass or on the sand and read my poems (or, around here, whether you must put up your umbrella against the rain or snow and then hurry in to read by the fire.)

I'm pleased to say that this book not only has splendiferous art by Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the cover of the paperback and on the hardcover jacket, but it also is beautifully designed and bound. It has lovely papers (particularly the hardcover, but both editions are quite fine) and interior decoration.

 Just send me a little note at smaragdineknot [at] gmail.com, and I will send you a sampler of poems.

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I have caved in and joined Google+...