Ray McDaniels' Murder: A Violet

I was cleaning and reorganizing my poetry shelves and every time I see this cover I just have to sit and admire it for many moments. I read a draft of the manuscript the year it won the NPS and it turned into a beautiful book. It's a fabulous feeling, to see the raw poems and pages of a project come to fruition. I'm sure I'll feel something similar when Pear Slip comes out later this year.

Come to think of it, Ray had an idea for a limited edition box where the poems would be indivdiually printed on cards and read in whatever order you wanted...I wonder whatever came of that?

The abbess is still my favorite speaker in the sequence. Check out her speeches to her sisters.

Kay Ryan's The Niagara River

I picked this up in 2006 after I found out Kay Ryan was the judge for the Walt Whitman Award, just to see if there was any chance her aesthetic might match mine (The Erotic Postulate was shortlisted for the award, so you start to wonder what your chances are when you're so close: one of the top 20 manuscripts out of the thousand plus submitted).

My take: compact poems, satisfying in their brevity and weird music/rhymes, as if no one's rhymed quite that way, quite like that before. Real wit and fresh turns on trite and familiar sayings/sentiments. She manages to evoke quite a bit with few strokes--at times they feel like sayings or aphorisms, perhaps a little too neat and tidy, though. A comparison to Cornell boxes is apt. And totally opposite my aesthetic.

GoodReads

So I joined yet another social site. I think this one is forgivable as it focuses solely on books and gives me a better space to organize my library, plus many of my grad school friends from Michigan are on it, so it's been a nice way to reconnect with that former community of writers. The book nerd in me had kept Excel spreadsheets over the years to keep track of my poetry library and at the rate I buy and read books they were always out of date. Now I can add books as I buy them and keep track of when I've read what and even do some reviews of the ones that influence me the most. Look me up if you're on GoodReads!

On Sequences and Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language

I've been thinking a lot about sequences lately, those who do them well, my penchant for writing a series or in groupings, as if to truly explore an idea I must sustain that energy over multiple attempts, approaching a topic or idea or obsession from multiple angles, exploring as many facets as possible.

This is one of my all-time favorite books (I even got it signed at a random dinner I was invited to with her--ask me about her comments on Hart Crane sometime). "Twenty One Love Poems" was a pivotal sequence for me, especially as I grew to understand why I tend to write in sequences. I spent the month of December that year (2000, 2001?) transcribing one poem each day, rewriting and retyping each word to really inhabit what she had done on the page. I was trying to write my own "Twenty One Love Poems" (I was going to do Twenty Two) and I took Rich and Neruda's Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair as models. Many of those poems became early versions for poems in The Erotic Postulate. There's a single copy of the collection out there called Scumbled I believe in the hands of a very special person (I hope he still has it!)

Anyway, if you ever have the chance to transcribe the words of a write you love, it's an amazing exercise.