Poem Book 2 Finished
I've been all baited breath waiting to tell you: I've just finished the manuscript for my second book of poems!
I've been all baited breath waiting to tell you: I've just finished the manuscript for my second book of poems!
I was lucky that Phases fared pretty well. Published by Cascade Books in 2017, it was reviewed pretty broadly (for a first book) and by some very generous and careful critics. That is quite enough to be thankful for and so I am nervous about this, my second outing. Will it do half as well? Will people, you know, get it?
The new book will be called The Elegy Beta and I sent it off to the publisher in December, at a different press this time. I floated a few poems to the poetry editor there who had some lovely things to say and has been a constant encouragement ever since. At this particular place, the book has to clear the general board—and not many of those people are poetry folk. So we have a bit of an uphill battle to convince them that The Elegy Beta will be worth their efforts. They meet in February, apparently, so I've spent the last few weeks putting on the finishing touches.
Maybe they'll take it! If they don't, I'll let you know and will come up with the next place that I think might make a good home for it.
These processes are super slow; I may not hear back for months while the various editorial teams discuss the book's merits and likelihood of success, but if you're the sort to offer prayers, or if you simply liked Phases and want to read more poems, would whisper vaguely West on behalf of this project? Anyone who would like to stay in touch and hear updates about the book's progress can leave an email address below and I'll send word.
Whatever happens, I'm thrilled. These are the best poems I've ever made and I can't wait—if not here, then somewhere else—to see them in print and share them all with you.
Thank you to those who have offered encouragement, or tipped me off to likely publishers, or just been great, inspiring, people whose kindness shocks me into response. It's a joy to walk these byways with you.
We Three Kings
This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry.
This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry. Apart from my own poems, coming in March from Cascade Books, my friend and sometime traveling companion Kevin Craft is publishing his second book, Vagrants and Accidentals with the lovely University of Washington Press. Craft's previous book Solar Prominence is full of formal fun and closes with the poem "To an Amphora, Salvaged," which is one of my top ten favorite poems ever, by anyone, and which I read on my podcast here.
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Webster, another dear friend and my erstwhile colleague at Northwest University, is publishing his first collection of poems on Anchor and Plume. I wrote the following endorsement for the book's rear cover, so I won't elaborate here. Suffice it to say: I'm excited for the next year.
After so much posturing on the parts of pundits, preening celebrities, poets on the picked through street market of the avant-garde; after so much hollow flash, so much essentially genre-bent lineated prose of small epiphanies; after so much, well, else, Jeremiah Webster's After So Many Fires comes out of the Pacific Northwest like rain: greening everything, cleaning the language, sharpening the eye, casting a slant-lit wonder about this whole good God-haunted earth, and, most importantly, allowing again a kind of deep breathing.
- You can pre-order Webster's book from the A&P website
- Or order Craft's from the UWP website
- Watch this space for ordering info for Phases.
Happy 2017, readers!
Sonnet 73 Animation
This collaboration with Dave Richardson was recently chosen for inclusion on Moving Poems which showcases "the best poetry videos on the web." Check out the website, and see more of Dave's work here.
What is a Chapbook?
ext month, the good people over at Finishing Line Press are putting out a chapbook of my poems, called Lunatic, about which you can read more here. I thought it a natural moment to say a few things about the form thereof.
ext month, the good people over at Finishing Line Press are putting out a chapbook of my poems, called Lunatic, about which you can read more here. I thought it a natural moment to say a few things about the form thereof.
Chapbooks have a long history in English literature, and have nearly always been associated with poetry. "Broadside Ballads" used to circulate for a penny, (also called "penny-ballads," and thereafter "penny-dreadfuls," when the form was taken over by throw-away adventure stories, the equivalent of airport reading like John Grisham or 50 Shades now).
Anymore, chapbooks are mainly the purview of poets. Since presses are reluctant to put significant investment into an unknown author, they'll often put out a chapbook first, which is a (usually saddle-stapled) short-form of a book, no more than 45 pages, with which to test the likelihood of a poet's success in a full-legnth. Some poets put out several chapbooks: they're cheaper to buy, and can be more coherent as works since they're shorter. I have a friend, the terrific poet Matthew Nienow, who has three chapbooks out so far; the form works for him, and works well.
As major publishers move away from publishing poetry in an economic era that rewards risk less than it might, small presses are stepping in and publishing smart, tight, little books in editions of 500-1000; they trade a smaller print run for a few more authors on the roster and make up the difference that way, or they focus on the book as a thing, which I had occasion to discuss in this review, and count on discerning customers' appreciation of the object as much as its contents to create a following. Floating Bridge Press, Ugly Duckling Press, and Codhill Press are the best-known publishers of this smaller type, and probably make the prettiest books.
Think about it like a band's putting out an e.p. before a full-length album. Sometimes it's because these are songs that don't fit in with the tone of the full-length somehow; sometimes they haven't written enough material to make a record, and sometimes the label isn't springing for the contract yet. Sometimes, these e.p.'s are extraordinary artworks in themselves: think of the great musical acheivements on e.p.'s proper or split 7" records: Pedro the Lion's Whole, Bloomsday e.p., The Gloria Record e.p., or the entire set of mailings from Postmarked Stamps.
My little book is coming out soon on Finishing Line, for reasons you can read more about here. I designed the cover myself, but that is as far as my hand in the production reaches, so I'm waiting with baited breath to see how it turns out. The poems were written over the last ten years or so, mostly following the completion of the M.F.A. at the University of Washington, and are part of a larger work from which I thought this sample representative, but which I think works on its own as well.
You can pre-order it here, should you find yourself possessed of a soul, $12.00, curiosity, sympathy for struggling artists, or any of the above.
New Poems published in Boneshaker
The people over at Wolverine Farms Publishing put together a spectacular little magazine in Boneshaker, full of narratives, diagrams, a very beautiful full-color poster, and two poems of mine: "Surface Tension" and "Counter-argument." You can order a copy here, or, if you're in Seattle, stop by Hub & Bespoke, which you should probably do anyway, because it's a lovely shop.
The people over at Wolverine Farms Publishing put together a spectacular little magazine in Boneshaker, full of narratives, diagrams, a very beautiful full-color poster, and two poems of mine: "Surface Tension" and "Counter-argument." You can order a copy here, or, if you're in Seattle, stop by Hub & Bespoke, which you should probably do anyway, because it's a lovely shop. When the follow-up issue comes out, (that is to say, when re-print rights have reverted to me) I'll post the full text of the poems over in the Publications section, where you can download, print, share, and otherwise participate in the poetic economy. Thanks to the editors, stockists, readers, and designers for making this object prettier than it needed to be.
"The Breaking Towers" at Monarch Review
My new essay--"The Breaking Towers: on Hart Crane's Crumbling Muses"--is up now at Monarch Review. Essentially, it's a meditation on the way critics treat artists, especially as seen in the new film Broken Tower (dir. James Franco) and in Paul Mariani's biography of the poet, by the same name.
Monarch is the new kid on the block in the (tough neighborhood?) of literary magazines, and it's based in Seattle, which is why I wanted to publish there. That, and the fact that they've got an epithet from Richard Kenney on their masthead, whose book One-Strand River is, apart from Shelley, the poetry I've re-read more than any other. I'm seriously in the middle of my 16th or so straight read-through and it still chokes me up.
Anyhow, the folks at Monarch are generous and give this content away for free. You can read the whole essay here.
Essay on Caravaggio
The Quietest Painting in the Room is an essay I wrote on this painting by Caravaggio and its relationship with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and published over at Comment Magazine. You can read the whole article by clicking this link.
New Poem in Grain Magazine
New article on Bernini at Curator Magazine
Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for that monstrous marriage...
Letter to the Editor
A letter I sent to the Editor of Poetry Magazine in response to a review written by (the usually very good) D.H. Tracy, about what is probably my favorite poetry book of all time. Read it on their website here:
Review of Michael Dickman's "Flies" published
My review of Michael Dickman's book Flies is up on the Books and Culture website now. You can read the whole thing here.
If there's anything that the onset (or is it an onslaught?) of e-books should teach us, it's that books themselves matter. For the most part, if the publishing industry crashes, I say they deserve it for keeping the public trust so poorly.
Case in point: the publication of Michael Dickman's new book of poems Flies, recently out from Copper Canyon Press, is one of the major events of the year for people who care about poetry. His first book, The End of the West, was the bestselling debut in the long history of that press, and if it was filled with a sagacious quietness that suggested an author twice Dickman's age, it was also filled with promise. Many of us reacted with a compound clause: that's amazing; I can't wait to see what he does next.
Part of that feeling comes from the fragility of Dickman's lines. His verses seem weightless at the same time that they feel enormous and heavy. That's not a hyperbolic contradiction: think of a blue whale and you have it—this slow, gigantic force. Or, picture the cover of that first book: a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Untitled, 1960) depicting a hanging victim, who, due to the camera's trick and limit, seems to float, or even to fly up off the page, when he should be dropping.
The cover of Dickman's new book...
New Essay Published by Mellen Press
Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in Europe and Asia During the Romantic Era: Charting a Motif Across Boundaries of Culture, Place, and Time is available now from Mellen Press, featuring a chapter I contributed entitled “Theatricality and Imaginative Failure in Keats.”
This chapter is part of a larger project I have in mind called “The Vanishing Point,” which will begin seeking a publisher sometime next Fall. Meanwhile, you can find this book on Amazon, or straight from the publisher here.
Abstract:
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek writes that “sublimity gives us simultaneously pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to the thing-idea, but precisely through this inadequacy, it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the thing, surpassing every possible phenomenological, empirical experience.” Keats’ “Ode of a Grecian Urn” may be one of the language’s greatest poems, but it also contains some of poetry’s worst lines. Those lines, especially “More happy love, more happy, happy love,” are not mis-steps; they are failures, and, I’m arguing, active failures in Zizek’s sense, a kind of theatrical dive, meant to claim for the poet a documentable experience of the sublime. In what thereby becomes a discourse on imaginative limits, Keats discusses the form’s ability to “tease us out of thought,” connecting that lack of thought with silence, and ultimately to a breathlessness he enacts in these passages. As the poet demonstrates the failure of the poetic faculty in the face of the sublime encounter –making a spectacle of the climb, failure, and recovery– he also hopes to induce a similar reaction in his readers, attempting to move us out of breath and to the same pitch of delirium he has exhibited, to make his private imaginative environment a public one wherein his theatrical swoon is contagious.