the acutest Angle

Angle, that slanted-toward-the-formal poetry magazine edited by those industrious poets, Janet Alexa Kenny (NZ) and Philip Quinlan (UK) has leaped on metrical feet into the world with a great TADA! If you are a person who cares about poetry, you just might like to visit. The issue is dedicated to poet and founder of interesting 'zines, Paul Stevens. You may download and browse the contents here.

   My presence in the issue (pp. 75-77, p. 101),
along with the first two lines of each poem:

The Fool Glimpses the City 

    --from The Book of the Red King--

Waterfalls of stars from outcroppings,
Torn vigorous lace making dervishes,

Because I Pass, I Pass, While Dreams Remain 

   --a little homage to poet Kathleen Raine--

   Who was it whispered in my dream?
The dream hour's angel whispered in my ear

Lumen Hour 

   --one of those uncanny dreams that want to remain--

Ankle-deep, I stand in sunlit waves,
An enormous disk of sun-lit water

To Make Much of Time 

   --finally a poem about internet frittering!--

Why must you fritter, twitter, play
And want fresh hours to the day?

"Angle welcomes poetry that is acute, possibly oblique, but never obtuse."

***

Favorite facebook posts of the week: 

so pleasant that I'm sharing them.

Carol Jean Treseposted toMarly Youmans

September 30

I read your book yesterday. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Wow. I couldn't put it down. I fell in love with all the characters, and I didn't want the book to end. You are a maestra, Marly!

Robin Egg shared a link via Marly Youmans.

September 29

This is a very short blog post, and you don't have to know the context or know Marly or know anything to read it and be amazed at what the English language can accomplish. Go on! Read it! Stop reading this, and go read that! It'll just take a second, and I can almost promise you'll be made to feel more aware and alive. http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2012/09/good-by-to-all-that.html

What lovely comments, one from a brand new e-friend. I liked them so much that I'm saving them here... In a world where chance plays a large role and the number of writers who support themselves by writing is miniscule, such words are sweet.

Autumnal: my busy-bee day--

I scrubbed the front of the house (disgusting, dirty, buggly-uggly) under the porch and the porch ceiling and raked leaves and cut down my garden and weeded and planted cardinal flowers for next year and gave my daughter a driving lesson and just wrote a little story. Trala! Why can't every day be like this? Think I'll revise a few poems before midnight, maybe toss in a little meditation and exercise and zoom around the moon a couple of times!

Waving, waving--

Here I am, gazing out the windows of the Latte Lounge in Oneonta, watching the Oneontans wander and a man dressed like Neil Gaiman wrestle a large black dog on the sidewalk... Ah, he has plunged upstairs with the dog in his arms. Quite strange. I'm waiting for my older children to get out of a loooonng driving class. So I shall go hang out at the Huntington Library and fiddle with The Book of the Red King, once I run off to get my youngest green hair dye. Evidently it is vital to have green hair on Friday. Let me know how the debate goes, pres-watchers.

A failure of imagination--

I may have more of a mixed crowd among my Twitter and facebook friends than most writers do; I'm not sure. But for a long time I have been bothered about the vehemence and hatred I see expressed by many of my e-friends about an amorphous "they." Usually this means liberal friends expressing anger or scorn toward conservatives or their beliefs, though occasionally I see the reverse. That tilt is natural because I have a lot of friends who are writers and artists, and we tend to fall somewhere on the liberal spectrum. My academic friends are likewise.

Here's what's interesting to me from a writer's point of view about all this.

Novelists dream about that large category, people. Yet there is a whole mass of people about whom novelists won't write except from a stance of scorn. Can anybody tell me the names of some first-rate novels from the past decade or so by writers who tell a story about conservatives with a stance of love and understanding, rather than scorn? That attempt to grasp the worldview, that clamber inside a paper brain with more in mind that mockery and destruction?

The strange thing about this tendency is that writers, of all people, should be able to enter into the ideas and views of those unlike themselves with charity for all. But in this one case, they do not. Will not. And yet for novelists, that is our calling . . . Entering-in is our vocation, or a major part of it.