Book blurbs

Lately I've been thinking a lot about blurbs as I've collected a couple for my next book of poems and advised a friend on obtaining some for his. In seeking blurbs, I've encountered unexpected (while hoped for) generosity and earnestness. For my pamphlet/chapbook Subterfuge for the Unrequitable (Potes & Poets, 1998), I approached via email two poets I'd never met or had previous contact with, Cole Swensen and Ron Silliman. I'd admired Swensen's work for years and was delighted when she provided a lovely blurb. With Silliman, I only had the virtue, by way of introduction, of bringing out the pamphlet with a publisher who had also produced some of his own works (and he's had quite a few publishers over the years), and yet he too kindly gave me a blurb for my pamphlet. 

The blurbs did more than provide the pamphlet with something to put on the back cover and perhaps persuade a few people to buy it. They heartened me greatly. Indeed, to this day rereading their remarks encourages me. 

I had a similar experience with my first full collection, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), approaching Robert Crawford, whom I'd only met briefly at a conference, and Rosanna Warren, whom I'd never met but whose work had influenced my aesthetic since I was introduced as an undergrad to her work.

I understand some poets are bombarded by so many requests for blurbs that they have had to set down rules: they don't do blurbs for students or they only do blurbs for students; they only do them for people they know personally; etc. I feel grateful to all those poets who make time to comment conscientiously on a younger or less established poet's work and thus help it find a readership. My thanks go out to them all.

The Poetry Life, with Thanks to Richard Price

At the first Reading Poetry Festival in June, Richard Price showed two flowcharts of a poet's life. One was a straightforward progression: magazine publication, small press book, possibly larger press book later on. There were perhaps five steps in all. Then Richard showed what a poet's life really looks like, with many 'steps' and arrows in every direction. Writing poems and publishing books became only two among many activities. Poets also give readings, collaborate with artists, publish pamphlets and broadsheets (though we could use many more of the latter in the UK), start their own magazines and presses, translate other poets' work, teach seminars and workshops, form workshops with other poets, create communities of exchange, friendship, love. I'm only touching on part of the breadth that Richard elaborated so well in the session, that makes me excited to think about the life I live. 

On another note, I also think this larger literary life is why American and British students pursue MFA and MA degrees in creative writing while knowing they may never have careers as writers per se. It's worth pursuing the degree for the sake of taking one's writing to a greater strength, for the sake of another year or two's deeper immersion in the world of writing, teaching and publishing. Or have my earnestness and idealism gotten the better of me? 
 

A Baker's Dozen from Yours Truly at Truck

New Zealand poet David Howard contacted me about a month ago to say he would be the August editor for blogzine Truck and asked me to contribute to his 'baker's dozen' series, in which I would select and comment on 13 poems that represented the course of my work. The poems and commentary are now up here; if you have trouble reading the small font, as I did, just select View from your browser menu, then Zoom In for improved legibility.

Chris McCully's Polder (Carcanet, 2009)

My thanks to Richard Price for recommending and loaning me this volume. Here are some favourite passages (it helps to know McCully is an Englishman long resident in the Netherlands). 


Where do you think the dust in the house called Song came from? . . . . It came from you, and the cycle of shedding solitudes.

from 'Dust'

The trains ran down darkness....

from 'The Thorn Carol'

As far as you look is artifice

or put to work: the air

fills oyster shells with snow; you're borne

by weeks of earth and ice; and deep

under the Amsteldijk carp sleep.

last stanza of 'Murdering the Sea'

The day went on dancing, but you didn't dance.

*

The hurling sky broke into headaches

while you broke into distance. . . . 

from 'On Greenfield Station'

. . . the sun bloomed briefly in the waters of Snoeksteeg.

Elsewhere the crowds, with their sum of unreliable accents,

queued for Anne Frank and the coinage of memory.

*

Today burns slowly, hanging ash on the incense stick.

The first tulips are an intricate diversion.

from 'A Tourist on Waterlooplein'

For lunch there's the bafflement of not working.

from 'Summer Sundays'

                You could call it home,

such weather, its visible timing,

its intimate pressure.

from 'Counting the Lightning'

By dawn the local tragedy's locked up

but its meaning is still at large--

*

. . . and the terrible facsimiles of failure and love

have become love.

from 'Fado'

She is the last of my loves,

patient, imperious.

from 'Ochre'

And here, in the flat, assumptive province

Called exile it's been autumn since winter.

*

No one told me that I'd have to learn

Such competence with grief.

from 'The Vinegar Days'

Polder is available directly from the publisher here.

i.m. Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

my mother with her grandson Brandon Etter and granddaughter Sara Cummings

You are daily, horribly missed.

Peter Cole's Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions, 2008)

I stumbled onto a stack of new copies of this book at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford last week and was surprised at the counter to be charged £4. 'How'd I get so lucky?' I asked. 'Look at all that stock,' was the response. So if you enjoy the passages below and would like to get your own, I recommend visiting or phoning the Albion Beatnik. I must say, though, I prefer Cole's earlier volume, What Is Doubled, which is less sententious and heavy on end rhyme than Things on Which I've Stumbled. 

Here are some of my favourite passages from this volume:


Not just the past ascending into
   the present of a given seeing,
but that present itself collapsing
   into the voices speaking to it--

so that the current, mixing, becomes
   duration which one, mostly, lives:

*

Cut off by worms and time--
as we will be,
                        and are

*

Thus the poet responds
                   to cruelty
song the product of exigency

*

. . . friendship souring inside aloneness . . . . 

*

how language's lightning in the sentence is won . . . 

from 'Things on Which I've Stumbled'

. . . my own slug-like conscience,

moving along by, it seems, contracting

against itself. The slime and motion inching me

toward the sublime, through confusion, like wheat.

*

                             Bad translation

is like drawing a bucket from a moonlit

well--and losing the silvery shine on the surface.

*

                               There is a power

rinsing spirit with detritus, like a tide.

*

In an extension of the mind, nearing its

limits--deltas of twisting branches forking

finely toward a pewter sky, shifting as

roots of those trees descend through silt, to sewage

and clay. There, Solomon said, are spirits.

*

The dervishes turn on axes as old

as earth's, but pointing toward their own tombstones.

Within their shroud-like cloaks and skirts they spin.

I'd gone thinking I'd see a hackneyed thing,

then watched my heart's arms like their dance unfold.

from 'Notes on Bewilderment'

. . . nothing without the mind's holding it there in the day's crucible reckoning . . . . 

from 'The Ghazal of What He Sees'

The army has nearly written a poem:

You'll now need a permit just to stay home.

from 'Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem'

. . . when things were good,

it seemed there was more

air within than without.

from 'Proverbial Drawing'

 

      

Current Issues

When I returned from Oxford yesterday, I had a happily large stack of post waiting, and this book was the most exciting piece. Last year, working with co-editor Jeremy Noel-Tod, I composed six entries for this new edition of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry: Andrea Brady, Forrest Gander, Laura Kasischke, Tim Liardet, Frances Presley and Catherine Wagner. Summing up a career and describing a probably evolving poetic style (as all these authors are alive and wonderfully active) in a few hundred words proved more arduous and time-consuming than I anticipated. At the same time, I enjoyed improving my knowledge and understanding of their work. 

The experience of writing the entries also gave me one of my most rewarding exchanges with an editor. Noel-Tod provided an ideal balance of guidance and leeway (for lack of the better word escaping me), and while I expect editing such a large work with so many entries and contributors will dissuade him from any more editing for a while, I hope another, perhaps smaller opportunity to work together in this capacity will come again sometime. 

I think I've been put off from doing many of these 'Current Issues' entries by people posting news of their acceptances for publication on Facebook. I understand so well the excitement and pleasure such an acceptance brings and often feel the impulse myself to make such posts, but I feel uneasy with self-promotion that I force on people's notice. Here on the blog, I figure only those interested will come by to read what I'm up to, but even so, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. *sigh*

So I'll thank the editors of Ambit, Molly Bloom, New Walk, Poetry Wales and Shearsman for their support of my work by choosing poems of mine to appear in future issues. I'm most grateful.

Interim 21: 1 and 2, 2002

I've long known of Interim magazine and found my interest revived when I learned some years ago that Claudia Keelan, a poet I admire, had become its editor. I've picked up issues of Interim at AWP over the years and am passing through them again before I give them away (I'm reluctantly giving loads of magazines and books away on account of my forthcoming move to a new office, where I'll have 2.8m of shelf space).


white new moon
of fingernail or bright noon of tooth
where I stand where I came to stand
where I stood and had stood
longer than my life the tree leaned
over the broken

Dan Beachy-Quick, from 'Mulberry'

...a god in worn-out dungarees,

reordering the universe of dark and light with huge paint-dappled hands....

Earl Coleman,  from 'On the Day His Lease Expired'

We wanted it come to rest tied up on the craps table,

so we would feel so very money storm then.

Crystal Curry, from 'Cherries'

To free oneself

of sententious platitudes

music the ally

silence the ally

Turn to the task

turn the task

turn it

and turn it again.

*

The easy wisdom

the impossible ambiguities

gone in an instant

the complex of time

*

Not the mighty dead

with whom you are wont to wrestle

but the humble dead

who can swat you like a fly

*

Days such as these

the presentation of events

is owned and disowned continually

in the poet's search.

*

Say an idea

and its concomitant emotions

or an emotion

and its concomitant ideas.

*

Therefore the repetition

of the text or act of love

leads inevitably

to the text or act of love

So that the consolation

appears to arise

out of a certain logic

built into the syntax

Built into the body

ears, eyes, genitals

posed against death

though "Deathward we ride"

 Norman Finkelstein, from "Track"

 awaken without casting off sleep

*

                                     But the present is

not sufficiently distant for observation.

Gordon Hadfield, from 'Via Soma'

bellwether to dust's watering hole

the horses the sheep the cows the fowl

emaciate, the vultures' virtuous compass

R.F. Marsocci, from 'Badlands'

So that it does not matter

          if name sing here or not:

what is a name inside oblivion?

Nathaniel Tarn, from 'Ancestors'

Which is all to say I feel the distance between

how the mind I call 'my'

used to be then

and is now.

Liz Waldner, from 'Double Space Time'

Peter Riley's Chapters of Age (Open House Editions, Leafe Press, 2013)

A lovely skinny pamphlet with the subtitle, 'Stone landscapes of Inishmore and Burren, May 2010'. Here are some favourite passages:


Chapters of age: increasingly anxiety,
Histories beyond credence,
Massive stone forts in mist.

*

And sing still and louder sing,
Psalmic impulsions rolling over the moor
Seeking an imperfect cadence.

*

Where is the musician or architect
Who built me this weary smile?

*

Saw everything from there, the rich
And the poor, the cloud descending,
The cattle driven over the cliff.

*

For there are answers to fear, 
Common or garden,
That singing up the coast.



You can get the pamphlet for £3.50 by buying it directly from Leafe Press.
 

Jaime Robles' Hoard (Shearsman, 2013)

Some favourite passages:


...words zigzag into words

and gather into cloth.

*

Like Persephone I have left my mother behind.
You, with your precision, would claim that she has left me,

but her death was neither her choice nor mine.

*

I enter the silence around me: its space grown large and doorless,
denser than fur
or feathers thick at the breast--
paths lead elsewhere.

Not all silence is retraction,
its intentionality allied with small cruelties.

*

And the planet veers through space, resembles an afternoon in Los Angeles

*

...baffled until combed into pattern.

from 'White Swan'

...words retract into her mind, repeating,

hang back

struggle to renew

become abruptly vatic

from '(lash of the tongue)'

--impulsed out, slipping forward: fox paw on ice--

from 'These Spare Objects'

time lies flattened,

stretched into a hoop:

pricked 

into lapsed

panoramas--chinks 

among cracks--crevices

opening so that

the fifth section of 'Diátrita (opus interassile)'

The soft shush of breath and heart's

outward flight quelled, fallen earthward turning--

*

The past's

forward flight looking back, always, turning often and again--reluctantly,

folded, replaced, altered.

from 'Four Matching Gold Bangles'

Though beauty unconsidered

seems like light or distance

in relief: a flight

from 'Utere felix, domina Juliane'

And because there are two of you,

time shutters open, just as now removes itself to then,

shedding on its way details--

patterns of light, and story-telling, absurd and restless.

from 'Sieve'

like love, a construct conjured from the body's

hungers, or spun off

from the wholeness of the planet,

the mammal's jigsaw

fitness.

the third section of 'The Hunt'

The silence between syllables hangs like a question mark

and, so, touch between us melts into a brief deferral of motion.

from 'Red Boat'

Further information about Hoard, and numerous links to purchasing it online, are available here on the Shearsman Books website.