Mountains calling my name--

Soon I am abandoning my little home ship and its crew (beloved humans, barky dog, and sleepy cats) and intend to go paddling off to the Carolinas to visit several Wofford College classes (thank you to Jeremy L. C. Jones, who is teaching A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and Thaliad) and do a reading at Hub City Books.

Might read from the two books mentioned plus The Foliate Head. Or not. I haven't heard what is desired as yet. (If you want to know something about any of my books, see tabs above.) Update: evidently it will be The Foliate Head with dashes of the other books, since I'll be talking about the other two at Wofford.

I'm hoping to see novelist Elaine Neil Orr if I make landfall (mountainfall!) on time. I'll be in Cullowhee, North Carolina and Spartanburg, South Carolina, doing events and visiting family and friends.

Y'all take care while I'm gone, and be sure to love one another, okay?

"Art is artifice"

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Marly Youmans, Thaliad
(Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)

Scott G. F. Bailey stole my brain:

The novel is and has always been a work of art, of artifice, an abstraction of a set of ideas about the world. A novel is—and pretends to be—no more “real” than a symphony, a painting, or a dance. Novelists might talk about life and the world, but they are not creating an accurate map of life and the world. To ask the novel to accurately mirror our own lives is to ask the novelist to do something that isn’t his job. Apuleius’ Golden Ass is clearly only a glancing blow against reality. The same can be said of Shakespeare, of Chekhov, of Chaucer, of Dickens, of Tolstoy, of O’Connor, of Woolf, of Manning, of whomever you care to name. Tristram Shandy contains many truths about life, but it is not a strict depiction of reality. The same can be said of Finnegans Wake. The same can be said of The Old Man and the Sea, or Lolita, or A Visit From the Goon Squad. I will also point out tangentially that every good book is an amalgam of what the author believes to be factually true and what the author has invented. The ratio of fact to invention is no indicator of the success of the book. And every representation of the world is imaginary, because the only accurate representation of the universe is the universe itself; anything else is an abstraction, an illusion, a fantasy, a falsehood, if you will. Art is artifice. There has never been a “realist novel” that was not a fantasy. There has never been an epoch where a work of fiction was equivalent to the actual experience of life. 

Now wasn't that good?

I'm always mentioning this business about "reality" and the novel to people. It's what makes talk about literary versus speculative fiction so often meaningless. But it's also what gives made things of all sorts much of their charm and beauty--the gap between creation and sub-creation, sometimes seeming narrow and sometimes wide.

Find him at Six Words for a Hat.

Sir Marketer, thank you--

UK: Stanza Press, 2012
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Elizabeth Adams

Having three books out in a year is a fearsome thing for a poet and writer. It means a lot of jumping up and down and waving of the arms. It means zooming about the world, as I am about to do once again, visiting Wofford College and Hub City Books. While I knew that the Mercer novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, could gather some readers, I felt uncertain about the Stanza Press poetry collection, The Foliate Head, now in second printing (hurrah!), and especially about the Phoenicia Publishing long poem, Thaliad. Would anybody these days read a long poem, however adventurous? How could I ever manage a novel and two books of poetry at once?

So I'd love to thank David (whoever he is--a Halethorpe Marylander and "top reviewer") for a lovely long review of Thaliad on Amazon. I've been pleased that the book is still collecting website reviews a year after publication--the most recent one (brand new) is here. In addition, I continue to be pleasantly surprised that a long poem is finding reviews on Amazon (US site, and a few at the UK site), since so many collections of poetry go without any reviews there. Reviews for fiction? No surprise. Surprised by reviews for a long poem? Definitely!

And David of Halethorpe is a first-rate marketer, starting like this: "This is one of those books that is special and unlike anything you've read before, and I urge you not only to read it, but to buy it, because there should be more books like this."

He knows how to end as well: "This is a beautiful work, probably destined to be obscure and under-appreciated, though it should be in classrooms around the country as an example of modern and relevant poetry. So please buy it and read it. It's one of those occasional treasures you are only likely to stumble upon by chance." Please buy it and read it. It's the kind of thing I'm entirely loathe to say, but it's those sorts of words from a reader that save a book from being wholly "obscure and under-appreciated."

In between, he says interesting things about the narrative and gives a sense of what it is like. I've never liked the selling part of publishing books very well, and have always felt rather shy about such things. But he makes his claims well! Now if only I (and every poet) had a mob of such reader-marketers!

The Foliate Head. Now in second printing.
UK: Stanza Press, 2012. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Andrew Wakelin.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage
Mercer University Press, 2012.
The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.
SilverAward, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards.
Design by Burt and Burt.

Swifts from the buttonwood--

Before long I'll be abandoning my family in Cooperstown for a little while, visiting classes taught by Jeremy L. C. Jones at Wofford College, doing a reading, and visiting my mother. It should be pleasant, if I can ever get through that annoying To Do list and leave . . .

In stray moments I'm reading Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2010) by John Lane, who teaches at Wofford. Also an essayist, he teaches Southern literature, Environmental Studies, and more.

The poems draw on thirty years of publishing books and chapbooks.

Here's a sample:

SYCAMORE


Praise the sycamore for its huge girth when left alone,
              so thick that settlers used its hollow heart for a barn.
              For the beauty of the buttonwood lies in the trunk.

Praise for these trunks more thick and sturdy than all other deciduous trees,
              a true forest giant of stream sides, flood plains and river bottoms,
              for dark spaces where swifts congregate and fly out at dawn.

Praise for sycamore bark, flaking off in big green patches on old trunks,
              for the wood, clay-yellow and warty, furrowed, bone-like,
              and yes, for the leaves, bright green and huge, paler below.

Praise for what we've made from them: oxcart wheels, barber poles,
              old stereoscopes, lard pails, hogshead for grain,
              piano and organ cases, crates, boxes, and butcher blocks.

Praise for the Carolina Parakeet, now gone, our only true parrot,
              and for their yearly feasts on sycamore buttons in spring when
              clouds with wings passed through so thick the sun was obscured.

And praise for the cooling depth of the sycamore's shade, for the rich
              deep bottom lands where the field guides say it still "takes happy rest,"
              for the streams running past and the sycamore leaves floating there.