Monthly Archives: December 2017

11 posts

What Lights YOUR Muse’s Campfire?

poetry writing writing inspiration writing poetry

It’s a fact of life: Famous writers inspire famous writers. Don’t believe it? Doubting your inner Thomas? You need only read Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, edited by Joe Fassler, wherein dozens of writerly-types share snippets of works that lit their muse’s campfire. Curious, I read the book–mostly–and here are a few for you:

  • Aimee Bender chooses Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” particularly the line “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
  • Sherman Alexie chooses a poem, too–one by the Paiute poet Adrian C. Louis called “Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile.” Alexie takes a shining to the line, “O Uncle Adrian! I’m in the reservation of my mind” because the metaphor gives him license to be an Indian and write like an Indian, which he has done with great success.
  • Elizabeth Gilbert waxes poetic for her namesake (unrelated), Jack Gilbert, who I have written about on this blog before (I took him on an Amtrak ride last spring and wrote a poem about the experience, too, which landed in my new book). Gilbert comma Eliza swoons to Gilbert comma Jack’s poem “A Brief for the Defense,” particularly the lines “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, / but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness on the ruthless / furnace of this world.” That Jack. He comes out metaphors a blazing, doesn’t he?
  • Amy Tan makes a more predictable choice: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
  • Junot Diaz taps Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. He especially loves this: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
  • Andre Dubus III tips his hat to Richard Bausch’s “Dear Writer.” In it, Bausch writes, “Do not think, dream.” That advice is for first drafts, by the way. After that, Logic, who has been pounding on the door, can be let in. See Dubus’s essay for particulars.
  • Billy Collins selects W. B. Yeats’ famous poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I will give that choice and Billy’s reasons its own post tomorrow. I love talking with BC.
  • Kathryn Harrison gives a shout-out to Joseph Brodsky. She cites the poem “On Love” and the lines “For darkness restores what light cannot repair.” If you like mysteries in the dark, you’ll take a shining to her essay.
  • David Mitchell? The talented novelist chooses a poem (God bless him, everyone!) by James Wright– perhaps Wright’s most famous: “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” It’s the equally famous finish he cites: “I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. / A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.” Those last five words serve as a warning not only to Mitchell, but to all of us wasting time with stuff like “writer’s block” and other malware of the mind. Just do it! (That’s Nike for the sport of writing.)
  • Curiously, Tom Perrotta is inspired by Our Town, the Thornton Wilder play. “At least, choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” The play moves Perrotta to tears to this day. And here I still have to read the thing!
  • Jonathan Lethem likes his Kafka, especially the short piece “Leopards in the Temple.” He notes the quote, “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the  sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.” Let the leopards in, Lethem says. Spot on, I’d add.
  • Charles Simic is the second writer to point to Whitman. But it is a less well-known Whitman: the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” The line noted here is “Young man I think I know you–I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.” Simic’s own wartime experiences as a boy in the Balkans creates the camaraderie with Whitman’s poem.
  • Emma Donoghue is one of two in the book who point to Emily Dickinson, the pride of Amherst, Mass. It’s the poem “Wild Nights–Wild Nights”: “Rowing in Eden– / Ah, the Sea! / Might I but moor–Tonight– / In thee!”
  • Claire Messed resurrects an old favorite seldom read nowadays, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. “These fragments! I have shored against my ruins.” It’s an admittedly cool line, for those of us with both shores and ruins.
  • T.C. Boyle acknowledges Raymond Carver (also written about on these pages this past year). He loves the ending of the short story, “Cathedral,” specifically the lines “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” In that scene, the narrator has his eyes shut, trying to reimagine life from a blind man’s dark point of view. You can see how that might connect to the writing life, no? Carver is the man.

Anyway, that’s a a sampling. In each essay, the author explains why the lines noted inspire, why they “light the dark,” so to speak, and feed their muse’s inner fires.

You can play the game, too, of course. It’s a popular pastime for writers to keep a quote posted to the wall above in their favorite writing spot, after all. For me, it’s Wislawa Szymborka’s poem, “The Joy of Writing.”

And you?

Season’s (and Spices’) Greetings

humor poetry

season

Season’s Greetings–and thank you–to my readers. I could take those seasons and spice it up with specificity: Cinnamon’s Greetings, maybe, or Allspice’s Greetings, or the lovely Clove’s Greetings (sounding so close to Love’s Greetings). Or I could be more inclusive altogether: Garam Masala’s Greetings! (A little black pepper never hurt anything.)

Whatever it is, I wish it for you and yours. I will not be posting again until the Christmas to New Year’s stretch, when I list my 2018 resolutions for all to laugh at. But today? Simply greetings and thanks:

  • Greetings and thanks to regular readers of this blog, living on the outer edge of the virtual world (flat or round, however you serve it).
  • Greetings and thanks to irregular readers who land here thanks to those time machines we call “search engines,” take one look around, and hightail it to the back button. Verily, you can’t go home again, unless it’s the internet.
  • Greetings and thanks to people of all countries who visit me, even if they have to use Google Translator to make heads or tails out of what I say.
  • Greetings and thanks to anyone who laughed at something written here. Chuckled? Smirked ironically? I’ll take it.
  • Greetings and thanks to anyone who enjoyed a poem posted here, sympathized with a poet here, or enjoyed reading some poetry-related advice here.
  • Greetings and thanks to readers who have given up their genre ruts, leavening their reading bread with short stories, poems, essays, plays, nonfiction. The novel may be king, but its kingdom is vast and varied! Pull a fresh horse from the stable and ride out to enjoy it!
  • Greetings and thanks specifically to readers who have not just ordered one of my books but read them and enjoyed them and contacted me to say as much. Now that’s a hat trick to celebrate (as they say in hockey rinks).
  • Greetings and thanks to people who connect locally by signing up for local writers groups or reading groups. For the grassroots writer, all literature is local.
  • Finally, greetings and thanks to people who do and do not celebrate Christmas. It’s a big world out there and the more inclusive we are, celebrating our similarities as humans, the better.

The Story of the “Last Poem In”

my poems poetry revising poetry The Indifferent World

benfranklin

As your publisher’s deadline approaches for the final version of a manuscript, decisions must be made. Is a poem too weak? And, if you pull it, do you have something stronger to replace it?

These sound like easy questions, but when you consider how unpredictable tastes in poetry can be and, more importantly, how difficult it is to judge your own work–especially when freshly written–they are anything but.

The story of the last poem in with my first book, The Indifferent World, is illustrative. I had been tinkering with a holiday-themed poem that suffered identity issues. Yes, the theme was post-holiday blues, but dark humor kept creeping in like the charred remains of a Yule log. I wrestled first with the poem, then with whether to pop it into the manuscript as a final switch. After sleeping on it, I opted to throw it in as a replacement.

That poem, titled “Black Dogs Redux,” was inserted deep into the book where it would be lost in the crush. But a funny thing happened. As reviews crept in, numerous readers alluded to “Black Dogs Redux” or quoted it. What was up with that, I wondered.

Like I said, illustrative. It seemed such an unassuming poem. A wallflower poem. A quirky-afterthought-to-some-of-its-more-noisy-neighbors poem. And yet, something about it invited comment, despite its dark secret as “last poem in” which, you might assume, would make it the “last poem worthy of comment.”

As the holiday is nigh once more, I figured I’d share it, warts and all:

 

Black Dogs Redux
by Ken Craft

The blue sad light is on again.
Maybe it’s the weather. Or the season.
Or the relentless grind of the quotidian.
Maybe it’s the “Is that all there is?” of the holidays,
where boxing ornaments, burning dried holly, and recycling
wrapping paper feels like picking up
after the dogs. The black dogs. Who heel all too well.
Orion has his astral-eyed pooch;
I have my black-furred dogs, loyal as shadow.

Walking backwards, man’s best friend is god, who has a hand
in this. That’s the sensation: the Great One’s hand applies
a slight pressure to my head, weighing me down.
The motivation to read? Nothing seems good anymore.
To write? I have nothing to say.
And damn Ecclesiastes anyway, it’s all been said.
Everything is vanity, all right, a striving after wind.
And like the Greek chorus, there’s this 33-degree rain
at 5 in the morning. Not the silent, deflected sound of snow
but that direct, cold ping running down the gutters of my spirit.

I adjust the sad light so the angle is better,
file rays in the blue facets of my eyes,
reshuffle them, come up with a deeper blue: slow, indigo
in scope. I can always sleep, but sleep leaves ash dreams.
I know exercise is an antidote, but I must first scale
the architecture of my own apathy. All those slivers under the fingernails!
It’s easier to eat ice cream that never judges.
Scoop of here in a cone of now.

Didn’t Ben Franklin say we should be well-rounded, after all?
He said a lot. And never once owned a dog.
Ben just donned beaver caps
and attracted lovely French ladies, who earlied-to-bed
when he was early to rise. Gay Parisian moths to a flame burning
with New World life, they were. Giggling in French. Obsessed
with their own dogged desires.

OK, so the thought of it gives a little lift. But just a little.
I’m too depressed for anything drastic.

 

Characteristic of last poems in, this one experienced the fewest revisions and perhaps it shows. Some readers admire the last lines of the second and third stanzas. But a few felt it should’ve ended after that third stanza, that Ben Franklin photo-bombed the poem much like Tom Sawyer photo-bombed the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

So be it. Last poems in, flawed and honest, are what they are, much like the holidays. It’s the nature of the beast and, in any publishing process, there will always be final, rushed decisions. In retrospect, I still can’t say that it’s better or worse than the one it replaced (which I can no longer recall). Still, it’s fun to Monday morning quarterback.

What about Lost Sherpa of Happiness, you ask? What was the last poem in for that book? “Puddle Duck at Picking Time,” of course. On page 62, still quacking itself up.

One Last List of Literary Trivia

poetry

tennyson

Part 3 of 3–a last look at cool facts gleaned from David Markson’s Reader’s Block:

  • Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.
  • Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.
  • Eliot, as an editor, rejected Animal Farm.
  • Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant second only to Hugo as the great European writer of his day.
  • Nobody ever laid it down without wishing it were longer. Said Johnson of Robinson Crusoe.
  • Blake was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
  • Joyce had lost all his teeth by the age of forty-one.
  • When Stalin himself was found dead, a recording of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto lay on his turntable.
  • Goethe, to Eckermann: Have all the nations of the world since Euripides produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?
  • Apollinaire came extremely close to being permanently paralyzed by a head wound in World War I.
  • Melville and Whitman were born within two months of each other and died within six. And were in close proximity in or near New York through much of their lives. Never meeting.
  • As a master at a boy’s school in London during World War I, Eliot tried to teach his pupils baseball. John Betjeman included.
  • John Berryman: Rilke was a jerk.
  • I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers: writers who write stories and writers who write writing. Said Raymond Chandler.
  • Carl Sandburg was the one poet who would probably gain from translation. Said Frost.
  • Kafka died in 1924. All three of his younger sisters would later be incinerated by the Nazis.
  • Lucia Joyce, institutionalized, when told of her father’s death: What is he doing underground, that idiot?
  • Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.
  • Dickens was certain after reading only her first novel that the name George Eliot belonged to a woman.
  • Joyce called “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” the greatest of all short stories.
  • Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.
  • I couldn’t do that to him. Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.
  • Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. And then walked home and took two days to die.
  • Whittier threw Leaves of Grass into a fire.

And from Markson himself, in the role of blocked reader:

  • Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read? What piece of music, the last he ever heard?

A Second Trove of Literary Trivia

poetry

markson

I’ve finished David Markson’s Reader’s Block, yes, but no–I’m not done sharing some of the neat trivia found in this unusual “novel.” Here are more, all taken directly from his 1996 book:

_______________________________________________________________________

Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions. Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she had not read Whitman. But had heard that he was disgraceful.

Why is the red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens rather than vice versa?

C.P. Cavafy lived with his mother until he was thirty-six.

Tennyson said that scissors was the one word in the English language he could not rhyme.

Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Said Pascal.

Napoleon told Goethe he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther seven times.

Anne Hathaway was twenty-six when she told Shakespeare she was pregnant. Shakespeare was eighteen.

Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.

Valéry to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944. About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who organized this response?

The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson. And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

Philip Larkin: Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?

That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D.H. Lawrence.

Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.

Edith Wharton’s family owned the Chemical Bank of New York. Wharton lived with an entourage virtually like royalty.

Twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead said.

Jonathan Swift left his money to found a hospital for the insane. And died mad.

Wilkie Collins maintained two households simultaneously. Both with mistresses.

Stendhal was an officer with Napoleon’s armies in the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

In Act II of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare allows Hector to mention Aristotle. Who will not be born until some nine hundred years after the fact.

Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty years of his life.

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Henry Fielding is buried in Portugal.

 

The Six Stages of First-Time Authorship

poetry poetry readings publishing

book sales

PROLOGUE: I wrote this way back in the late spring of 2016, after my first book released. For some reason, I decided against publishing it because it cut too close to the bone. Today, with two books to my credit, I better appreciate the humor in it. If you can’t laugh at yourself and the crazy pursuit of poetry writing, what can you laugh at? Ha-ha. Enjoy. Especially if you’re a poet or a would-be poet. A reader of poetry, you say? A little insight for you. And hopefully a chuckle or two.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Everything happens in stages. I learned this in the Self-Help aisle. I couldn’t help myself. And now I’ve discovered it is true of first-time authors who publish first books. Not just via my own lens, but by studying other authors of first-time books. And though I call it “The Six Stages of First-Time Authorship,” I might as well call it “The Sick Stages of First-Time Authorship.”

Admittedly, results are skewed. Mostly, I examine first-time poetry books, meaning it’s a special subset of authors whose works, in 99.7% of all cases, never see the light of a bookstore bookshelf. Instead, the books sit on a dark, unchecked (except by the author–every day) shelf of Amazon. A dot all-is-not-calm bookstore.

Stage One: Euphoria

Holy Toledo Ohio, my book is out! And no, Ma, it’s not from some cheesy vanity publisher. It’s the merit system. Go-o-od stuff. Told you so, doubters! Confucius would be proud! Must tell everyone I know! No, no. That’s too obvious. Must tell everyone I don’t know, too! How do I spread the word without seeming to spread the word? Show me the way. I’m there. I’m a worker bee. I’ll do the social media scene, even. I’ll send you a copy if you write me a review. What’s more, I have this feeling that some big reviewer from some major paper is going to stumble upon this book (God works in mysterious ways–and, part-time, for me!) and decide to write it up. The darkest of dark horses, this book! It’s only a question of who (The New York Times Book Review?), where (page 37? I’ll take it!), when (give it three weeks, tops!), and how (Kismet)! Woot!

Stage Two: Happiness

I’ve sent copies to every relative I know (one, “Aunt Irene,” I made up). And friends (some “acquaintances,” really, but whatever). They, in turn, will suggest this book to people THEY know. And on Goodreads, many of my friends (whom I’ve never met) have marked it as “To Read.” YES! All of these “To Reads” will soon convert to 5-star reviews once they’ve read it, I’m sure. OK, OK. I’ll be a big boy about a few 4-star reviews because that’s how I am. Magnanimous. Give it a week. Or two tops. The book is only 72 pages, after all. So that’s around 32 reviews right there. In the bank! Right out of the gate! And everyone knows reviews beget reviews like Biblical people begat Biblical babies. Can you say  “catalyst”? Can you say “momentum”? Can you say “royalties”? Ka-ching!

Stage Three: Reasonable Hope

I’ve been checking those Amazon sales stats every few hours and hey, not bad, especially in the category of POETRY>CONTEMPORARY>REGIONAL>LIVING(MARGINALLY)WHITE MALES>STAGE 3. (Surely it can’t just be the 3 out of 87 people at the office who said they bought it after I group e-mailed the entire company. Twice.) And all 32 of those “To-Reads” on Damn-Good-Reads? I got one review out of them so far. But it’s just the beginning, I’m sure. Almost sure. Even tsunamis start somewhere. As is true with them, a little lift would do me good…

Stage Four: Reality

Holy sinking Amazon jungle mud! I’ve never seen sales stats sink so fast. By the day, even! And the number of “To Reads” on Goodreads has held steady. OK, to be honest, it’s down one. And the number of reviews has held steady, too: one (Cue Three Dog Night: “ONE is the loneliest number that you’ll ever see…”). And the number of “Currently Readings” is steady, too (Zero Mostel would understand). I sent reviewer copies weeks ago and followed up with “Did you get it…?” e-mails just like I’m supposed to. Marketing Man! That’s me. The guy listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”! Is this all there is? Doesn’t a man get rewarded for his hard work (marketing) and brilliant ideas (writing)? Or is that a Horatio Alger myth or something?

Stage Five: Despair

Well, THAT was fun (not). Back in Stage Two some party crasher said the only money poets make is at readings where, if they’re lucky, two people might buy their books. Might. “Yeah,” I thought. “But my book is different because it’s by ME and, last I checked, I’m special.” Or so I thought. (OK, I don’t want to think. Too much. Because it’s getting me down. And yes, the Buddha would be very disappointed in me. Too much self. Just a hyphen away from -ish, he’d say. Or something clever like that, damn him.)

Stage Six: Enlightenment

All this time dreaming. All this time beating the hollow drum. A couple of months lost! A couple of months I could’ve been writing! You know: Book Two. As in “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” As in “Do it again, only better.” It’s what writers do. And the second time around (one hopes), no more stages. Just back on the saddle and writing again. It’s all that matters. Writing. Every day. In the words of another poet — one of Biblical proportions — “All the rest is vanity, a striving after wind….”

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Nota Bene: After Book Two, I’ve learned. I started writing right away. I am no longer a self-deluded man. Of course, every poem hungers readers just like you hunger for chocolate chip cookies, but reality is a good teacher and writing is a good habit and joyful challenges are the stuff of our workaday lives. On to #3!

Random Thoughts, Encroaching Christmas Edition

opinion poetry

pinesnow

Random Thoughts, December 9th Edition:

  • When it comes to Homer, there are Iliad people and there are Odyssey people. I am an Odyssey man, myself. The journey towards over the swords. The cagey man over the ragey man. The ship’s keel over the hero’s heel.
  • Shopping? You say you’re done with your shopping? Must mean I best get started.
  • Poets I like to read in essay-mode: Robert Hass, Tony Hoagland, Jane Hirshfield.
  • Holiday meditation (oxymoron alert!) recommendation: Chinese and Japanese poetry. Read, reread, repeat.
  • Is there a word for the sound of snow landing on snow in a windless snowfall? That word is a poem.
  • Ditty of the Day by Arthur Guiterman:

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar’s bust in on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself!

  • Poetry ideas are pack animals. I see many, write them down, and pick which one to muse upon. Then it’s forest silence for long stretches. Ideas go ghostly.
  • Most contemplative season? I vote autumn, which puts man’s mind to the great mystery of life–his own approaching winter.
  • “Stopping By Woods on Snowy Evening” may be kids’ stuff, but it’s many a poet’s guilty pleasure committed to memory, too.
  • Speaking of, why do we use the term “committed to” as if memory is an asylum?
  • A fully-trimmed Christmas tree is a glorious thing–if someone else trims it, takes it down, and vacuums the last needle (found along about April).
  • “the season ’tis, my lovely lambs,” (e.e. cummings)
  • “With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stone” (W.B. Yeats)
  • “Not the silent, deflected sound of snow / but that direct, cold ping running down the gutters of my spirit” (K.R. Craft)
  • But I flatter myself.
  • Because no one else will.
  • Collectors can make money on e-Bay, especially this time of year, if their collected nostalgia is in mint, never-used condition, but I collect compliments and kind words. Neither has a market, other than the bazaar of my mind, and it is bizarre, indeed.
  • Definition of an “Old Soul”: I prefer medieval and Renaissance Christmas music to modern fare. Apologies to Mariah Carey (all she wants for Christmas is whoever is listening to the song).
  • I just read this week that the word “whom” is dead. The “whom” is dead! Long live the “who”!
  • Cindy Lou Who?
  • There’s something to be said for the Grinch and Scrooge. Both Christ and the Buddha would say it, too.
  • Give the gift of experience over stuff, yourself over stuff, your generosity over stuff.
  • Go forth this Saturday and be a collector of moments. (Hint: It’s not in any store and it doesn’t have a web address.)

 

Three Reading Mysteries of Life

poetry reading poetry teaching poetry

three

Three reading mysteries of life:

  1. Kids love to be read to and mostly love reading–until around ages 11 or 12, when interest in reading plummets for most of them. What gives? Why? Is it the “adult” poking forward, elbowing the “child” into the background? Is it the oncoming angst of adolescence? Is it their teachers who turn every poem, story, and novel into an analytical punching bag vs. a piece of writing to be enjoyed and experienced? Is it everyone’s favorite straw man (or android): technology, in all its wily, Siren-call forms? A mystery, when you consider the unique benefits of reading for enjoyment.
  2. Kids love poetry; adults do not. For little kids, poetry comes in the form of children’s books. The good Doctor Seuss, for instance. Goodnight, Moon. The Runaway Bunny. Even, on a basic level, Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, which still enjoy deep roots in the rich earth of our memories. The New York Times poetry editor, David Orr, thinks it’s all about sound. This theory tells us that poets who are conscious of sound devices over all might be on to something. Nevertheless, a mystery, when you consider the beauty and economy of poetry, a genre that can touch truths like no other.
  3.  General readers label all poetry as inscrutable. Which brings us to the question of accessible vs. inscrutable poetry. Which type of poem is most attractive to the lay reader who has become an adolescent and given up nursery rhymes by large white waterfowl trying to stay clear of pillows? I would guess accessible. Too bad “accessible” is equated with “easy” by the Guardians of Poetry Doomed (they’re out there!). Easy poetry is often deemed lousy poetry by high school English teachers and college professors who have tortured poems and tied cement blocks to the ankles of the genre, forcing it overboard, but most readers who have moved on to novels, thank you, and “nonfiction” (if there is such a thing anymore), you’re welcome, really want no part of the inscrutable stuff that so delights the theoretical, tweed jacket crowd. A mystery, when you consider poetry is a genre worth saving, not guarding.

For Authors, Goodreads’ “Giveaway” Program Becomes a Misnomer

Goodreads Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry The Indifferent World

Sherpa

News Flash: Four days remain for Goodreads members to sign up for a free copy of my new book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness. If you do the Goodreads thing, you can sign up for a lightning bolt’s chance here.

I’ve spoken to the GR’s Giveaway program before on these pages and have decidedly ambivalent feelings about it. For publicity purposes, I signed on three different times for my first book, The Indifferent World, and dutifully sent books out to the lucky winners.

Unlucky me, however. Not one of the winners bothered to review the book, and as the losers do not buy books once they fail to win the freebie (at least in my experience), it’s a net loss for the author–in this case, the cost of three books plus postage.

The news flash I trumpeted above will be my swan song with the Goodreads Giveaway program. As of January, they will be turning to pay-to-play, charging authors $120 to use the program. Of course, to the big publishers, this is nothing. But to small independent presses like Future Cycle Press (which accepted my first manuscript) and Kelsay Books (which accepted my second), it’s a bigger deal.

The small presses cannot afford marketing, so it’s all on the author. Can I afford $120 to play in the Amazon-owned Goodreads Giveaway program? I don’t think so. I’d have to sell an awful lot of books to justify the cost. Meantime, the rich (although that word doesn’t quite capture the dimensions of Amazon’s wealth) get richer. And Amazon adds to its growing reputation as an author-unfriendly bull in a china shop.

I argued against this move in the Goodreads Feedback group, and was somewhat amazed at the number of posters who praised the move by Goodreads. You are a business, one poster lectured in browbeat mode, as if authors from Dan Brown to Ken Craft were the same animal worthy of the same broad brush.

Uh, no. Not all authors are the same.

Nothing in life’s for free! the pro-paying posters chirped. Plus this should weed out the dreck we freebie hunters have to swim through–all those self-published books and that other stuff.

I guess I fall under the category of “other stuff,” as all published-on-demand (POD) books– even if they undergo the process of being read and accepted by small independent presses–follow the same model as self-published ones if they use a publishing outfit like Amazon’s CreateSpace. It’s all one to those who argue in favor of payment for services.

Of course, I would argue that readers who post reviews on Goodreads (many of them not only beautifully but professionally done, all of them for free) should be paid if we’re following the same logic.

After all, do these free reviews drive sales and feed Amazon’s insatiable money machine? Rhetorical question. Amazon has buttons under every book on Goodreads, each leading to the Mother Ship sales juggernaut.

Different, though, the naysayers cry. What’s good for the golden goose (Amazon) is not good for the old gray gander (every day readers’ reviewers). Meantime, ironically enough, most small presses who cannot get precious shelf space in bookstores must sell on the Mother Ship’s web site. That’s right: Amazon dot all-is-not-calm.

Anyway, to come full circle, there’s a free book if you want to enter and take your chances by December 10th, midnight eastern standard time.

After that? I hope you’ll buy a book and strike a blow for the little guy (publisher AND poet). If you like poetry or feel the call to reconnect with the genre, it’s better than Dan Brown, I think you’ll find.

But then, I’m a little biased. Just a little.

When Reputations Are Wrong

poetry reading poetry

olds

Sometimes poets get a reputation and carry it around like Jacob Marley’s chains. Consider Sharon Olds and sex. The two are closely aligned in poetry readers’ minds, but Olds is more than that. She can write about family–both her kids and her parents–in moving ways. Ways that could pass muster with the Hallmark Channel, even.

Consider “Late Poem to My Father.” It is an exercise in empathy wherein Olds uses her imagination to visit her own father’s childhood and what he might have experienced under his father. The incentive? Olds’ father apparently was an alcoholic, and like most alcoholic fathers, no joy to be around if you were his son or daughter.

“Why?” Olds must have asked. “How?” And, as is so often the case with poets, these questions drove her muse.

Olds’ poem, then, is similar to an adopted child’s search for her birth parent. The chariot is driven by the winged horses Why and How. The poem seeks answers. It wants to understand, to connect, in the worst way. Let’s take a look-see:

 

Late Poem to My Father
by Sharon Olds

Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.

 

Here time dials all the way back to Dad at age seven, when he was “helpless, smart.” Then comes the purposely vague “there were things the man / did near you, and he was your father.”

So much for hard and fast rules. Writers are instructed to forswear words like “things” and yet, sometimes, they are just the ticket. Sometimes letting the reader imagine different concrete interpretations enhances the effect.

Olds continues with her reverie: “…something was / not given to you, or something was / taken from you that you were born with.” Either might explain a path toward alcohol–one cleared with the machete of misery rooted in childhood.

The poetic part of the poem hits its stride toward the end:

I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me.

Not many are willing to look at an adult and see a child “formed in front of the fire,” or see “the tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the hear in place / snapped.”

With images rendered like that, despite his very evident flaws, the father is redeemed by a forgiving daughter who wishes she were there to help him as a child when he was most vulnerable. And now, she finds it noble that, unlike so many others, her father, addicted as he might be, refuses to carry the curse forward: “And what they did to you / you did not do to me.”

Sharon Olds’ poems with sexual themes are often frank and provocative–hardly subtle. But the story, as with most reputations, is more complicated than that. Reading a collection of her works shows that she can be sensitive and forgiving, too. She is not, in other words, a one-trick pony.