Upcoming + Red King + Hometown press

UPCOMING POSTS

I INTERVIEW MY VISITORS returns with a 2-part interview. For some reason, the first one of these I ever did is extremely popular and still gets daily hits, all this time later. I can't figure it out (other than the fact that Susanna is a charming woman!) I can understand people still keeping qarrtsiluni-related posts alive, but some of the others are more surprising to me. What's going on with the Midget Palace post, say? Shorties of all kinds, I love you!

THE THRONE OF PSYCHE news will continue.

I will be writing and posting a 6-part series that I might just call WHY I AM NOT A GRUMPY OLD BOOKWOMAN: OR, WRITERS IN WONDERLAND. You may remember the Grumpy Old Bookman and his advice to writers. I duly read and got a lot out of it, some years ago. But I have a somewhat different point of view. I intend this series to answer some of the questions that writers of various ages ask me. Topics covered will be somethng like this: Print Publishing: Persisting and Giving Up; Randomness, Luck, and Being Lucky; Doing What You Want to Do; Home Life and Being a Writer; The Calling of Publishers vs. the Internet; A Salad of Advice, or What Nobody Wants.

THE BOOK OF THE RED KING

“Mezzo Cammin” has picked up four more The Book of the Red King poems: “The Rose of Laughter, Laughter of the Rose” and “The Grail” for the June issue; “All Hallowed Angels Say” and “The Peacock’s Tail” for the December issue. And I'll be reading at the "Mezzo Cammin" reading at the West Chester Poetry Conference in June. More about that later on.

HOMETOWN PRESS

Hometown interviewers tend to ask you different sorts of questions from other journalists. Here’s Maggie Tobias at The Sylva Herald, published seven miles from where I went to high school in Cullowhee.

Photograph credit goes to sxc.hu and Robert Linder of Springfield, Missouri.

"Fire in the Labyrinth" in CLIVE HICKS-jENKINS

FORTHCOMING

My gallimaufry of pieces, "Fire in the Labyrinth" (excerpts below), is forthcoming in a marvelous anthology titled Clive Hicks-Jenkins, available from Ashgate/Lund Humphries in conjunction with Grey Mare Press and Clive's 60th-birthday retrospective exhibit of paintings at the National Library of Wales. My contribution tells the story of Clive's withdrawal from the world (after a life in the theatre) at Tretower Castle and dives into paintings for wild Clive-ish new--an examination of the buttons of angels, a playground beyond the world, tea in the garden with Cocteau and manifestation of saints and much more.

FIRE IN THE LABYRINTH - CONTENTS

Tretower
Kevin and the Blackbird’s Nest
The Tea Party
Holy the Negative Space
The Congregation of Birds
Buttons
The Count of Three
The Book of the Phoenix, 1: 1-40
Tender Blackbird
Blue and Red
Labyrinth of the World

from "Tretower"

Some days the landscape is so harsh and cold and empty that he imagines himself the last human being in the world, and his tongue cleaves to his mouth. Some days the strange energies of the place possess him, and he could weep for the loveliness that cracks him in two. The very stones of Tretower seem to prophesy that he will not be as he has been, that the man who braves seven years in the wilderness may yet wrench a blessing from the place. When tourists appear from nowhere, he hardly remembers how to form syllables—then speaks all in a rush. But abruptly they are gone, and the bigness of the place and the silence that is no silence (insects, birds, the slamming of the wind) seizes him once more.

When he flings himself on the earth, Tretower looms over him. The birds come and cover him with leaves. The wild winds flatten and tear at the grasses. The frost giants tug at the stones.

“That was all long ago,” people say; “long ago he came out of the wilderness with his staring eyes that had the look of one who has wrestled with some fearsome angel.”

from "The Tea Party"

When did the saints appear in the garden? Half-hidden by trees, they are watching the two artists. The sunshine brightens on stone and leaf. The Virgin Mary steps into the clearing and looks wonderingly at the two men and the teapot and cups and the cut slabs of bara brith. Cocteau gets up immediately, but the painter does not move.

“The clarity of a dream,” he says.

The light increases enormously, and the paths and trees burn, every pebble and twig distinctly present. The painter’s hands tremble as he drinks in the brilliance and crisp edges of the garden, the glimpses of saints, and the young Virgin, her crimped hair veering from her head like a cockeyed halo.

This is what I wanted, he thinks, more light and every intent so clear. Color that says anything is possible. Nothing hidden.

Cocteau is looking at the pale lime green of his hands and laughing as shafts of young trees slide upward in unexpected blue twilight. Sunflowers break from the earth, shoving six feet into the air. God in the form of an angel plummets from the clouds and seizes the Virgin by the wrist.

ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY

The information below is from the Ashgate website, with a few small changes.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Imprint: Lund Humphries
Illustrations: Includes c.150 colour illustrations
Published: April 2011
Extent: 200 pages
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-84822-082-9
Price : $70.00 » Website price: $63.00

Contributors: Simon Callow, Damian Walford Davies, Andrew Green, Rex Harley, Kathe Koja, Anita Mills, Montserrat Prat, Jacqueline Thalmann, Peter Wakelin and Marly Youmans.

Critic Nicholas Usherwood has described the painting of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (b.1951) as 'reflective, expressive painting of the highest order'. From a background as a choreographer and theatre director, Hicks-Jenkins has since the 1990s become increasingly well-known as a painter, producing exploratory sequences of works that embrace diverse subject-matter with a consistent and distinctive vision. His paintings are now held in all the principal public collections in Wales and his artists' books are in libraries worldwide; he is a Royal Cambrian Academician and an Honorary Fellow of Aberystwyth University.

Available here.

More information on a second book with a contribution from me and timed for the retrospective will be posted soon.

Gioia on Bishop

Dana Gioia has an interesting assessment of Elizabeth Bishop in The Wall Street Journal. Here are a few bites:

HER ACHIEVEMENT

Elizabeth Bishop's future reputation will surely fluctuate slightly according to the currents of taste, but she has indisputably won a permanent place in the American literary canon. An independent and honest writer who never chased fashion, joined groups or struck public poses, she labored at the art's perennial task—to communicate the joy, sorrow and wonder of being human. She took her time about it, and it shows.

BISHOP VS. MODERNISM

There is a special irony that Bishop has come to be the signature poet of late 20th-century American literature, a period stereotyped by free verse and experimental forms. Bishop admired Modernism, but she resisted being drawn into its endless arguments about stylistic innovation and the radical transformation of human consciousness. She was, in the highest sense of the word, a prosaic poet, who like the supreme prose masters—Flaubert, James, Na bok ov —could create a verbal fabric so fine that nothing was lost to it. Never trying to be merely modern, she succeeded in becoming perpetually immediate and contemporary.

ELSEWHERE

To see a few good images of Bishop's homes in Brazil and read a little about how she was and is seen there, fly here.

Philip Lee Williams & The Throne of Psyche

Surprises are tricksy.

Sometimes you hold a thing as a surprise-to-come, and then you have to give it unexpectedly after a different, unforeseen surprise comes to pass.

On the 5th, writer Philip Lee Williams (come fall, we will have corresponded for a decade) posted a lovely piece about me and the upcoming book, The Throne of Psyche.
So I had to tell him that I had dedicated the book to him.

When you give a little gift, and then the gift turns out to mean a lot to the person, it is thrilling.

At left: "Crown of Laurel" by Sulamith Wulfing. I picked it because when somebody says such good things about one's writing, it is like being crowned with laurel, as poets were once crowned in the old days when poetry still ran in people's veins.

* * *
P. S. If you go to Phil's link, you'll find out some good things about his upcoming books!

P. P. S. Picture: Hmm, not sure where I originally took it from. Probably artpassions.net, a great illustration site worth visiting. Public domain image.