Looking for a New Year resolution? Try Jezebel's List

Jezebel's blog, which is more like an ongoing twitter pump of fascinating news items, starred an ace with this list, compiled by readers in reaction to a men's magazine list of the top 75 books every guy must read (and almost all written by white males of course). The list is based on readers of the website, and with only a few respectable exceptions the authors are all female, and (thank you) not all white. How many from this list have you already read? Finishing the list should keep you busy for 2009.

And, uh, would anyone like to send Jezebel some suggestions for poetry?

http://jezebel.com/5053732/75-books-every-woman-should-read-the-complete-list

Nothing Smaller Than Your Elbow

Nothing Smaller Than Your Elbow, from local Bluestem Press, presents poetry by Mary Ann deGrandpre Kelly, Marlene Miller, Niki Nymark and Marilyn Probe. It is available locally at Left Bank Books, 314.367.6731.

The volume is nicely printed, with cover art based on a photograph by Cissie Lacks.

I have worked with all four of these writers in various poetry workshops, and have published Niki Nymark (A Stranger Here Myself), so come to this new collection as something less than a stranger. Nymark and Probe have both published in numerous anthologies and are always welcome presences in any work of poetry. Kelly and Miller have been harder to find in print and this excellent anthology corrects the deficit.

Mary Ann deGrandpre Kelly's best poems have a quality of spareness to them. My favorite here, "Continental Divide," is set against a western landscape and a psychological background equally dry, sharply dileneated, and breathtaking. The poem won a prize in the St. Louis Poetry Center's James H. Nash Contest earlier, and I've been waiting to see it achieve a permanent place in print since then.


Marlene Miller's work is well known in St. Louis but is not well-printed. She's one of those rare poets who prefers, simply, to write. So far that's meant the publishing end doesn't always happen. Let's hope this volume stays in print a long time, then.

Although many of Miller's poems are delightfully airy and beautiful, or sly and humorous, I'll quote here from a very somber one about two young girls who were murdered and thrown from a bridge, one of them never found. This elegy is a beautiful gift to them...

from Mississippi Passing

When the dead pass through locks

no one knows.

No one touches their lips with a lily

or wipes night from their eyes

                with a soft handkerchief. . . .

Niki Nymark has included old and new favorites here. One of the favorites, When the Old Folks Make Love, includes this:

When the old folks make love,

they frame each other's faces

with their hands

like a favorite photograph.

They touch each other's lips and cheeks,

melt together, not

with the raging, aching burst of summer,

but with a deep, slow sob

like the sound of a temple bell

coming up from Atlantis.

Top that if you can. Well, you can't. So buy the book, read the entire poem, and you'll be a happier person.

The anthology ends with selections from Marilyn Probe. She ends her set, and the book, with a poem that says what it says perfectly, in carefully crafted art, and needs no other comment.

Holding the Lion Within

            Lambs that learn to walk in snow
                        -Phillip Larkin

Dodging dizziness as winter closes,
I am as vulnerable as a lamb
that learns to walk in snow.

The lion within must pause as I do
to see a cardinal blend into a bough
Only flickers of crimson peek through,

the way my red-hot tempo needs to ease
to discern a distant sparrow in the slant light
of faint fog, steady in a tight wire freeze.

Unlike aging that does not stop or slow,
the lion in me is tamed by the lamb
that stumbles, as I stand, walking as if in snow.

Landing on both feet: Stacey Lynn Brown

I have watched from afar (well, not too far -- Brown lives and works about 5 miles from Cherry Pie Press) the unfolding of Stacey Lynn Brown's battle with small press publisher Cider Review Press after author and publisher moved to polar positions over differences regarding the production of the book. You can easily come up to speed by checking out Brown's blog (check the linked entry, and read backwards through the end of August 2007) and the counter opinion posted, surprisingly, on Poets and Writers (soon to be renamed Publishers and Publishers).

The story has a happy ending, of sorts -- Brown's book is being published by another press, and Cider Review has spiffed up their Terms and Conditions to clarify what authors may and may not talk about. (Huh?)

The real happy ending, though, is that Stacey Lynn Brown's evolving blog is a pleasure of clear writing and interesting opinions, and in addition to waiting for her book of poetry to hit the stands, I'm hoping and waiting for a collection of essays. Her blog, Ten Fingers Typing, moves to my "Blogs to watch" list (see right panel).

Weaving the Light, by Mary Ruth Donnelly

Mary Ruth Donnelly's new chapbook is looking for readers! Weaving the Light is a pleasure to read, and to re-read.

Donnelly's poetry is informed by both the organic world and the composition / recomposition of art within that world. Many of her poems are a simple walk through a natural setting that opens a reflection on so much more. Others are responses to artistic pieces and tell their own complex and inviting stories. Some are explorations of deep griefs faced, explored and fully encountered, often through nature or art or simply the experience of moving down a road, through the city.

A poem from her Tea Journals series uses a decaying city and a journey, the physical world and the small but brilliant comfort of taste, to locate a purpose for moving forward:

Rooibos Tropica

St. Mary of Victories

Wet, heavy clouds
crowd the ramp to the bridge.
Rain has washed away the morning's snow.
Concrete arches, rust stained,
hoist a precarious railroad bridge
over the river, the bottoms,
and the highway I drive on.
The old Powell Building,
its huge windows shattered,
its red bricks graffitied,
abuts the bridge's entry ramp.
The tower of an old church
anchors a neighborhood
that must have been there
before the highway, warehouses
and empty factories.

As I speed toward this growing dark,
a hint of rose at the back
of my mouth
surprises me,
blue mallow petals and lemon:

a pool of yellow light
a small room in a walkup
a kettle on the stove, a day too short
for the work it held,
some warmth, some sleep.

The poems, in the end, speak for themselves. Here's another one:

Something fine

about the morning,
the mild wind,
Queen Anne’s Lace drift in the meadow
below the wooden porch
and beyond the cropped yard and garden.
Across the draw, the pasture’s
gray waiting, damp, quiet,
turns gold suddenly,
not at all startled
by the sun as it rises
above the oaks.

Weaving the Light (ISBN 978-0-9748468-6-6) is $10. Email Cherry Pie cherrypiepress@yahoo.com) or call or stop by Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO 63108 (ph 314.367.6731).

Rankovic's essay on Don Finkel

Catherine Rankovic, local essayist extraordinaire, has posted an interview she did with Don Finkel years ago. It is more than worth checking out -- go here to read it: http://ucollegeblog.blogspot.com/.

The essay is a tribute to Don, now one of St. Louis's lost treasures, and also an insightful and humbling portrayal of the arc of one great poet's career as the poetry publishing industry collapsed in the 1980s and left so many poets stranded, fading into "out of print" and with no publishing outlets available. Finkel's attitude toward life, his way of keeping focus on writing and on what mattered (the relationships around him), and his eternal good humor all provide good sustenance for any writer.

Rankovic has written a number of essays based on interviews with poets. It is a true pleasure to have this one posted online. She is precise, aware of the vast local and industrial background against which her subject matter is poised, and her eye for her subject matter is more accurate, and tender, than any camera.

Rotogravure - Nanora Sweet reviewed

Nan Sweet's Rotogravure has been reviewed by Stephen C. Behrendt in the Winter 2008 issue of Prairie Schooner. Behrendt generously lets the poems do most of the talking, observing that Sweet's chapbook is "big with histories and memories." He quotes from one of my own favorites, "Council Grove," and says ". . .what fascinates Sweet [is] that barely definable 'power' that infuses and moves the world, carrying with it the sheer animal force of history that inhabits all places, all things."

The recent issue of Prairie Schooner is available locally at Left Bank Books (where you can also pick up a copy of Nan Sweet's Rotogravure!), or order from the Prairie Schooner website.

St. Louis classic poets - Finkel, Urdang, and Clewell

The local Riverfront Times features a timeless gem - David Clewell reciting his poem remembering Don Finkel and Constance Urdang. Listen here: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/stlog/2008/12/donald_finkel_1929-2008_constance_urdang_1922-1996.php. Clewell, as always, is a long muscle of language to listen to, here flexing into the infinity of friendship.

Are We Feeling Better Yet?

Colleen McKee, author of poetry chapbook My Hot Little Tomato, has co-edited an anthology of essays on the health care industry. Not poetry, but in its own way more essential. Are We Feeling Better Yet?: Women Speak About Health Care in America, an anthology of 21 essays, is currently available only through the publisher, Penultimate Press (http://www.arewefeelingbetteryet.net/ Paperback, 215 pp., $19.95).

Along with Colleen McKee, St. Louisan Amanda Steibel co-edited the anthology. Local contributors include: Janet Edwards, Denise Bogard, Cathy Luh, M.D., Catherine Rankovic, Corrine McAfee. The foreword is by Jenni Prokopi, founder and editor of ChronicBabe.com.

Lyrics in song, lyric in verse

Song and poem use many of the same levers to open up the reader's senses.

"Much of what makes great lyrics great is the choice of words," says Kevin Seal, hosting the "Word Choice in Lyrics" episode of website Pandora.com's "Pandora Video Series: Music 101" series.

This mp3 podcast conversation includes standard poetic devices, and wanders beautifully through (for example) the timeless effect of Anglo-Saxon words, such as ghost, contrasted with words whose roots might be more rationally understood from Greek or Latin (e.g. apparition).

Listen here: http://blog.pandora.com/archives/show/2007/11/word_choice_in.html.

Pandora's Music 101 series has many other podcasts that will beautifully instruct you, and evoke things and structures poetic. Try, for example, the one on music intervals.

A Stranger Here Myself - reviewed in St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Niki Nymark's chapbook garnered a review by Robert Boyd in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Boyd is familiar with Nymark's work, and in this review of "interesting and expert work by poets who matter" he notes she is "in command of her medium in A Stranger Here Myself." Read the review here: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/book/story/001E391C3CD860B5862574EC007573E6?OpenDocument

The Domesticated Writer

David Gessner's piece in The New York Times on his decision to take a job teaching writing is food for thought. He provides a guided tour of the last hundred and fifty or so years of possible means of self-support for writers, and shows how the job of teaching writing evolved from being seen as a sinecure to finally being a real job.

This topic is always interesting to me, as I have made a number of decisions keeping me away from a career in the academic world. Sometimes I regret that choice; most times I don't. Others exist there happily, and balance their creative writing with the teaching of it, apparently without terminal conflict. I would rather make a living in a world that is separate from the world where I write. Either way, it's a divided life of sorts--just a slightly different flavor of division.

Gessner talks about the need to have some kind of a job, despite the price you pay for that divided life.

It’s not just a question of success or even genius, but temperament and discipline. Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there’s something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day, and there’s a reason that writers are second only to medical students in instances of hypochondria. In isolation, our minds turn on us pretty quickly.

Yes, sad but true. Every writer's fantasy about winning the lotto and plunging 100% into creativity without the ballast and worry of bills and obligations isn't all it's cracked up to be.

That said, now I'll go back to my world of cubicles, computers, co-workers who ride motorcycles for fun instead of read books for fun. After all, there are bills to pay....

Poetry or Eggplant?

Sometimes a poetry session unearths the unexpected. Last week a small working group I've been involved with--we call ourselves "Six on Saturday" because that is how many of us there are and that is generally when we meet--wandered into the garden of one member. Keith and his wife Danica have engineered a lovely garden of heirloom vegetables. We saw dark chocolate colored tomatoes, and I fell in love with this eggplant. At least as good as a poem. Maybe better.

The eggplant also doubled as an instrument of the imagination, and posed as some kind of a plump sea creature with an elephantine trunk...

The Pleasures of Editing

Making jelly. That's the only thing I can think of that has all the pleasures of editing. You watch the fruit ripen, pick it, select the jars, the pots, the old and secret recipe to use. You sterilize everything -- patience, patience, and great care with the details. In cooking, it helps to measure exactly but the final decisions are based on your senses -- you have to know exactly how the jelly looks when it gets to the 'jelling point' and the sparkle of the smooth rolling surface of it is almost hypnotic. You learn from the successes, and you learn from the failures.

And when you're done you sit there and admire it, and know you didn't really do a damn thing but know what to pick and what to leave out, and how to package it. Everything else is up to the fruit -- if it's excellent fruit and exactly ripe, the jelly is wonderful.

Elderberry is the best, because it's dark and rich, a bit like grape but not as brassy. People try it and say, "Wow! What is this?" It tastes familiar but just a little interesting and strange. The mystery stays with you.

Needed in Late Summer: Hymn to Life

The Poetry Foundation has posted the entirety of James Schuyler's overly lush and essential poem (is my favoritism showing?), Hymn to Life, which includes everything, even the kitchen sink. Schuyler zips from high to low and back again in a way that ties all the unreconciliable bits of life together in a big bouquet.

. . . And just before the snap of temper one had sensed so

Strongly the pleasure of watching a game well played: the cue ball

Carom and the struck ball pocketed. Skill. And still the untutored

Rain comes down. Open the laundry door. Press your face into the

Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening

Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles

Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way

You let your hair after a shampoo. . . .


Life at its best and worst simultaneously, ripe and irresistable and startlingly real, always startlingly new. Read it here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21778.

A Stranger Here Myself - more kudos!

Niki Nymark's A Stranger Here Myself has received a strong review from the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the St. Louis Jewish Light, Robert Cohn. The reviewer notes - "With bold brush strokes, sharply visible lines and vivid colors, Nymark is a modernist poet of the first rank, and her collection, A Stranger Here Myself, should have a place on the shelf of any serious reader of excellent poetry."

Read it here: http://www.stljewishlight.com/news/308232295667923.php.

Alternate ways to publish a chapbook

If you want to publish your book, stay in control of the whole process, and (something I can't do for you, given Amazon's expensive on-boarding) get listed on Amazon and get carried by Ingram, self-publishing through an outlet such as lulu.com is an alternative. See the details and costs for that, plus a few other alternate approaches, laid out in Reb Livingston's blog -- http://cacklingjackal.blogspot.com/. The blog doesn't seem to index individual entries, so start looking at the entries dated August 29 and keep going.

There are + and - to any publishing approach, and I think she lays them out well for the lulu.com one.

Part of the question to answer when you decide to publish a chapbook (and that's after the question, WHY do I want to publish a chapbook, really?) is, What community does this make me part of? There are reasons to align with a contest whose end-result might be a chapbook, or with a small press with a small distribution, or to produce your own hand-made book (see the DIY blogging world), or to self-publish through a commercial outlet such as lulu.com. You get a different main course, vegetable, and dessert with each of these options.

And of course, like all hungry poets, we all hope for more than one supper. . .

A Poem about Peonies

One of my personal favorite poems over the last few months comes from Keith Byler, who is part of a writing group I've been with for several months now. This poem won a place on a St. Louis bus, along with one of mine, in the Arts in Transit contest here this spring, so if you're lucky enough to be from St. Louis you may have seen it during your morning ride. For the rest of you, here it is:

Dog Days

Flat blue-pale parchment sky
hangs blank

save for still life blazing sun.

Peonies weep in their beds
shoulders sagging,

heads bent into leafy hands.

Lorna Dee Cervantes - where the poet dwells

"That's where the poet dwells: in conditions and relations." So says Lorna Dee Cervantes in an interview from 2003. She's talking about the real human element, underneath the niceties your mother taught you, and underneath the highly encoded language of blues and folk music that contains -- once you unlock the history and language -- more than you think you can bear.

If you want to cut through the abstractions and little prides of your life (all our lives), through the often-academic priorities that poetry sometimes gets too lost in, and get right down to the bone, go read the interview. Count on spending quite a bit of time with it, as Lorna Dee Cervantes speaks from the heart, direct, with both feet firmly planted on the ground and with her arms embracing all of humanity and naming it her own, even after calling out its horrid contradictions and meanness and stupidity. She finds, in the end, the true meaning of being a poet, in some advice from mentor Hayden White: Follow your obsession. And she does that, digging into the history of songs by Memphis Minnie. Follow that trail back to me, since the songs uncover history of the 1917 riots in East St. Louis (a stone's throw from Cherry Pie Press, and with no small influence on current life in St. Louis). It is all personal, it is all in the relations between us, and the conditions we experience and must write from.

Where does the trail find you?

This is from the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is an interview with Alex Stein: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=mqr;cc=mqr;sid=e05280ee21429c514e8a7b2be607a265;q1=Cervantes;rgn=main;view=text;idno=act2080.0042.406

And for some poetry, here is her expansive blog: http://www.lornadice.blogspot.com/.

"The Language of the Heart" - a poetry contest

Calling all St. Louis area poets! Gitana Productions is sponsoring a poetry contest for poems that touch on the teachings of Rumi. The contest is based on the premise that art can heal ethnic and racial divisions (and St. Louis, like most places, has its share of those). Feed your optimism and hop on board for this!

There are cash prizes as high as $300, and poets will read their winning poems at an event at the Regional Arts Commission on October 18.

Contest information, plus stories about the fascinating work of Gitana Productions, can be found here: http://www.synergy-pr.com/media/GitanaProductions/24/303/1. The contest deadline is October 10, so you still have time!

To poets interested in publishing a chapbook --

Publishing a chapbook is very different from publishing poems in journals. With journals and magazines, the publication has a ready-made audience and your poem is introduced to that audience. With a chapbook, there is no audience but the one you already have in hand and the one you are willing to expand through your own efforts. Cherry Pie will do its best to help – send out review copies, send out announcements, place the book at the best independent bookstore in St. Louis (Left Bank Books). Ideally, your chapbook will benefit from prior and future Cherry Pie publications, sharing those existing audiences, and expanding that audience for other Cherry Pie authors. However, with chapbook marketing you – the author – are the bottom line.

Here are some questions to help you determine if you are ready to publish and support marketing of your chapbook. Don’t let the questions overwhelm you but do allow them to push you. The marketing of a chapbook has much more to do with author effort than it does with the quality of the poems. (There you have it, the dark but true underbelly of chapbook publishing.)

If you don’t already have an established audience or faithful reading friends, a chapbook gives you a good chance to build that, if you are willing. If you are not willing, then the chapbook will sit on a shelf and be read by very very few people. It will not be worth your effort, or mine.

If you are merely looking for the satisfaction of seeing a small collection of your poems nicely printed, please go ahead and do that yourself. If you think having a small press name on the book adds some mysterious air of legitimacy, then make one up. (I’m not being sarcastic – I applaud this approach. It will encourage you to regard your work more seriously, and that’s a good thing.) Your local copy shop or a good desktop printer can accomplish this cheaply and you will be in total control of the effort. Consider giving out copies free to all your friends. Consider giving it to strangers. You will gradually build an audience, and you will have a small collection of poems to be very proud of.

You don’t need me for that.

On the other hand . . . If you have read some of the poems from Cherry Pie authors, and you want to be associated in the reading public’s mind with those authors, and you feel your own work is equal to or better than their work, and you feel you have something to say or show about U.S. poetry that is bone and root part of the Midwest experience – its rivers, its cities, its world-blend of cultures and histories, its plains and its Ozark mountains that are more ancient and more worn and therefore smaller than the Rockies – then let’s talk.

The following questionnaire is intended to help you think through the reasons for and implications of publishing a chapbook. The answers you come up with are not for me, but for you. They will help you figure out if this is really what you want to pursue. And they will help you ensure your work, if it published as a chapbook, does get read.

AUTHOR CHAPBOOK MARKETING QUESTIONNAIRE

Title of chapbook: _________________________________________

What response does the title elicit? Would it make a reader want to pick up your chapbook and open it? Is the title about tangible things (objects, senses) or is it about an idea (to be pondered)? Is the title simple and memorable, or would an interested reader need to write it down to remember it? Have you checked Books In Print or Google for books or songs or anything with a similar title? Did that search turn up anything you don’t want to be associated with?

About you and the background you can bring to the effort of marketing your chapbook --

URL of any blog or website you might use for publicity:

Present occupation (your day-job):

Previous jobs:


Educational background (traditional or nontraditional):


Principal cities and states in which you have lived and in which you still find memories and personal relationships:


About your poetry and your work within the world of poetry --

YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO ANSWER ALL OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS.
JUST ANSWER THOSE THAT YOU CAN, BUT DO THINK ABOUT ALL OF THEM.

Please list other books you have written, including publisher, year of publication, and type of book (i.e., poetry - specify book or chapbook, or fiction, how-to, essays, children’s book, biography, etc.). Include any anthologies your work was included in. Do any of these books share a potential audience with your poetry chapbook?

If you listed any books in the item above, describe what marketing was done by the publisher and by yourself. Tell if the book was adopted by a book club, reading circle, academic class, workshop.


Have you ever edited a publication? Have you ever served as a reader or on the board of a literary publication? (Literary journal, anthology, etc.)


Have you done community service work related to poetry? Poets in the schools, poetry workshop organizing, any volunteer or officer or board role in an organization supporting poetry, etc.

What local poetry groups do you participate in, and what is your role in each?

What local poets have you openly supported – by attending readings, buying their books, asking a local library branch to order their books, writing reviews for them or recommending their work to others?

List any reviews of your work, with place of publication, reviewer’s name:


List any poetry book or chapbook reviews you have written, with name/author of work reviewed, place and date of publication (web or print):


Publications (specify web or print) where your individual poems have previously appeared:



Poetry readings you have participated in within the last 3 years (place, date, solo or group reading):


Poetry readings you have helped organize within the last 10 years:


Honors, citations or prizes you have received related to poetry:


Why did you decide to collect your poems in this chapbook instead of printing individual poems in a wide array of web or print journals? Or instead of putting together a full-length poetry book? Or instead of making a website or blog where you could post all your poems?


What is the theme of your chapbook or your mechanism for ordering the poems?


Are there groups, other than other poets, to which your book would have particular appeal?


How is your chapbook unique?


With which published poets do you feel your work has resonance? (A different way to state this is, If you like to read poet X then you will also probably like to read my work.)


As a poet, what are your strengths?


Does your chapbook have something in common with other Cherry Pie chapbooks? Does it solidify or does it extend (no wrong answers here, folks) the kind of poetry Cherry Pie has published?


Have you investigated other chapbook publishers (how many?), or self-publishing?


About your ability and willingness to market your work --
Are there any well-known people (locally) who should see an advance copy of your manuscript for purposes of giving a pre-publication promotional quote? If so, list their names, their contact information, and describe their relationship to you and/or the book. Indicate whether you think it would be more effective for Cherry Pie or for you personally to contact each one.


Please list any local or specialized media that should receive review copies of your finished chapbook. Indicate if you have a professional relationship, or previous reviews, with a reviewer or editor at the publication.


Please write a brief biographical sketch appropriate for the general news media and to be used on press releases.


Do you regularly attend any major conventions or conferences related to poetry, writing, academic studies, or any subject area related to your chapbook?


Have you read any of the previous chapbooks from Cherry Pie Press? What could you offer in terms of publicity for your own chapbook that would help get previous Cherry Pie chapbooks into the hands of new readers? What might you expect other Cherry Pie authors to do for you?


What do you expect your publisher to do in publicizing your chapbook?


Thank you!