Blossoming minotaur

Study for Glimmerglass jacket by Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales

You see, evidently I am feeling decorative rather than talkative today... Perhaps that is because my dearly beloved snored like an inspired, electrified banshee all night. Perhaps it is because I am in dire need of scouring a long manuscript and don't have time. Perhaps it is simply whim. Perhaps it is because the green world outside has colonized the house. Perhaps I am sunstruck, wordstruck, funstruck! Perhaps I know but am not telling.

Metaphysical tea party with Edith Sitwell and Flannery O'Connor and peacocks

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, interior vignette
for Glimmerglass

SEEING

 Edith Sitwell: It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

 Flannery O' Connor: The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

 ON “KEEPING RABBITS”

 E: A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

 F: Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. 

HIDDEN LIFE

 E: The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

 F: I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

HALF-ALIVE

 E: I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.

 F: Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.

 WOOD FOR THE FIRE

 E: I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

 F: Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

 F: All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

 ART AND INCOMPLETENESS

 E: Poetry is the deification of reality.

 F: The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

 F: The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.

Glimmerglass, the postcard--

Mercer sends me a present.

Postcard in the making, complete with one little error...

Metaphysical gold star if you find it!

Perfection still to come...

                      

Thalia on the move--

Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.
Hardcover from Phoenicia only
and paperback from the usual suspects.
Interior/exterior art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins
with design by Elizabeth Adams.

In this country, where a small press poetry book sometimes sells in the dozens and is doing well when it sells a few hundred copies and where long poems are rare and surprising, I am pleased to say that Thaliad appears to be alive, still trickling into the world, and even appears to be picking up a few small classroom orders. (Last year I visited two classes at Wofford College taught by writer Jeremy L. C. Jones; they were reading both Thaliad and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I know it is being taught in St. Louis this fall, and would love to know more about where it might be popping up, but those things are hard to know.)

I have been happy with reviews of the book, including Amazon reviews and Goodreads reviews, which show me that the book's readers (including quite a few writers) like the wedding of a wild novelistic adventure tale, developed characters, and a beautiful, ruined setting with the largeness and force of the epic. I thank them for playing in and helping to create one of my worlds.

To confess the truth, I was prepared for the idea that this book might find only a handful of readers. I am glad that some people in this country and elsewhere are proving me wrong. It is thrilling to find that readers are daring the quest for a home and re-building the world with Thalia.

One of Clive's many interior decorations.

Energy and persistence conquer all things. 

--Benjamin Franklin, wordsmith, founder, inventor, diplomat, etc.