New Blogs

Wow! I had no idea that folks were still reading this blog. I now post regularly on two other sites: www.kvdbooks.com and www.helphealtheworld.com. Come on over.

Wasted comments.

To those of you trying to use this website as a commercial bulletin board, it's going away soon and no one will see your sneaky comments that have nothing to do with the post to which you try to attach them. Please find another, honest, way to get your message out.

Moving Day

Today is moving day. No, I'm not moving my furniture. I'm moving my virtual home to a new location: kvdbooks.com. From now on the new posts will be there, waiting to welcome you. And eventually, when the gods of the virtual world nod, the 209 posts on this site will become available also. Thanks for you patience while I work on this transfer. See you over there.

Emerson Was Right

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The promise I made to read through my poetry shelves from A to Z? Foolish. I almost made it through most of Dante Alighieri's Inferno before I piled the book and my notes on top of the big dictionary, where leftover papers often gather, and drove as quick as the law allows to the library. I've lounged and loved the couple of mysteries I plucked off the new-books shelves and feel better for it. At least I don't fall asleep at every third page.

I once spent an interim semester (that long break between fall and spring semesters) on Dante, and I seem to have stuck with that, if my transcript can be believed. But the slogging through hell is no longer something I want. What did impress me was Alighieri's talent for the truly terrible scene, an imagination that leaves Hollywood a distant second for inventing torture and fear and gore and all things scary and ugly. I am surprised some desperate producer hasn't tried to make a film of the Inferno. Of course, given my resistance to filmed violence, maybe such a movie exists and I have successfully put it out of mind. Hurray for that.

Let me say, quickly, that I do not hold John Ciardi's translation responsible for my many unscheduled cat naps this past week. He did a fine job of turning medieval Tuscan language into contemporary English, all the while maintaining a strong semblance of the rhyme and structure which Dante so masterfully created. No, the lack is in me. I'm a vagabond reader. Always have been, always will be. Now, I'm off to see what other book winks at me from the bottom of the library tote.

Alighieri to Zukofsky

Recently I posted my experience of reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, about a reading marathon involving a book a day. And I nixed that idea for myself, while remaining impressed with Nina Sankovitch's courage and determination. She was reading to deal with grief. I read to deal with boredom, restlessness, stress, and challenge. I've almost finished Bill Moyers' The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, in which I keep noticing that what other writers say about their work jump starts my own writing. And makes me thirsty for deep drinks of poetry, makes me want to know far more than I do. So here's my challenge to myself, and it's so simple I don't know why I haven't done it before. I want to read/reread every book on my poetry shelf. And, like Sankovitch, comment on what I've read. I had to do this sort of response in poetry school, so why not refresh those skills and teach myself about the books I thought enough of to give precious shelf space?

This won't be the first time I've reminded myself how much I have yet to learn about poetry. It won't be the first or last time I tell myself that it's cowardly to hide out in my beloved mystery stories and fluffy non-fiction. It will supplant my goal of reading every book I have myself listed in Feed: Reading Lists for Those Who Eat. (That's my latest publication, soon to be available on Amazon.) But I want/need a break from food lit. I now want, as Mark Strand says, to eat poetry. I want to feast on the tasty truth that poetry provides.

Suffering Poets

Currently I am reading and enjoying an old collection of interviews with poets, Bill Moyers' The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995). These conversations in print are like lurking in a fine literary salon. The only problem is that Moyers, good as he is with interviews, does not challenge a theme repeated by several of the thirty-four poets included. They talk about the horrors of writing, the struggle, sometimes for decades to get it right. Donald Hall says, "It's typical for me to spend three to five years on a poem . . . not working on it every day, but maybe every day for six months. . . . I need to sleep on it five hundred times." And Stanley Kunitz says, "I think poetry is the most difficult, the most solitary, and the most life-enhancing thing one can do in the world."

Well, I get the life-enhancing part, but I cannot agree that it's the most difficult thing in life to write poems. Nor do I plan to spend 500 nights sleeping on one. Life is too full of life for that. I like the idea of William Stafford writing a poem every day, but I don't do that either. I manage most weeks to make a fair start on a new poem, but I don't expect 52 whiz-bang, Pulitzer worthy results every year. Writing a poem is most often a pleasure, like doing a good puzzle or solving a mystery. The discovery that comes from working on the piece is my reward, the response from readers and listeners a bonus. But the poem is words on paper, less worrisome than a sick child or a broken heart. I write about the child, the heart, the hunger in the world and the unfairness of life. But writing about it is not the same as suffering the event itself. Steven King says in On Writing to put your desk in the corner and not in the center of the room. It is not, however important, the center of your life.

Book a Day!

The most amazing thing I've read this week is Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch. This woman has four children, a husband, a house and house pets. When her sister died, she was grieving by overachieving, and it wasn't bringing her any solace. So she turned to books. She vowed to read a book a day and review it on her blog: http://www.readallday.org/about_nina.html. I was astounded. Her account gives, in bits and pieces, her process. First she created a work space, complete with a purple arm chair, then cleared shelves and dove in. Her library searches were guided by the length of the book. She figured she could read 300 pages in four hours, still write the review and be done by the time her boys came in from school. Of course, it did not always work that way, but despite distractions, she reached her goal, although at times it might have been midnight when she finished the day's work.

This project intrigues me. I am not about to replicate it. Too many of the things that please me would make this pressure unwelcome. But what Sankovitch did was to relieve some of my guilt when I will not put down a book until the last page. This guilt may come from the only time I recall my mother hitting me. I was in 7th grade, deeply immersed in a book when she announced that dinner was ready. I read on until she came into my room, took the book from my hands and smacked me on the bottom with it. Hardly child abuse, but that event summed up her ambivalence about my reading. As a school teacher, she valued reading, was proud that I had learned early and read almost constantly, but she also wanted me to eat while dinner was hot. I wanted to read while the story was hot, or while I was supposed to be vacuuming or helping start dinner. To this day I get most of my household chores done before I open a book. It's a message from my childhood: reading is good, but housework comes first. Oh, what a tangled web my generation of women has faced.

Sick Computer, Sick Writer, Sick Reader

Recently I caught a bug from my iMac or Mac caught a bug from me. My second cold in three weeks has me cranky and lazy, but at least today I'm at my desk, trying slowly to catch up with myself. I've read all the books I checked out from the library last Friday and I'm stuffed with other people's words. Mac will return home today with a new power cord thingy. For a while it looked like he might be terminal, but we are both going to recover. The thing is, I had already announced to some writing friends that I was taking a short sabbatical. Maybe Mac understood and decided to take one also. No, I don't think that's it. I think stuff just happens. No, I don't think that either. The technology doesn't really know what I need, but the universe does and very little happens that does not feel synchronous to me. I needed a stay-cation and having Mac in hospital made that easier to do. My little netbook is fine but a 90-lb weakling compared to Mac. Much easier to ignore.

During this hiatus from work, I've toyed with ideas for new interests to spark my energy, bird watching, archery, travel to a remote place where I know nothing and no one. But, sigh, I probably won't do any of those. What I am doing is listing all the nagging details that have piled up while I sneezed my way through six mystery novels and two boxes of Kleenex. I just finished a Nevada Barr book, Deep South, in which Anna Pigeon, National Park Service ranger and sleuth, finds herself beaten and alone in a deep cleft of the Natchez Trace. That's how I feel, like I'm in a muddy crevasse and too weak to pull myself out. Anna was rescued by chance passersby. Maybe if I smear myself with mud and blood and break my arm someone will rescue me. No? Too melodramatic? Right. Better to return the library books, sip some exotic coffee and resume my own life. But I will keep my eye out for what might be coming over the lip of the depresssion and hope that it's not an alligator or a murderous, greedy man with a shovel and a rope.

Finding Louise Penny

Gotta love my library: browsing the new acquisitions recently, I found a mystery by an author whom I did not know, Still Life, by Canadian writer Louise Penny. Immediately, I was drawn in by her fully developed characters and her artistry with the language. Anyone who can write this sentence impresses me: "Violent death demands Earl Grey [tea]." Nod to the long history of English cosies in which tea is immediately ordered for witnesses and family of the murder victim. Succinct, clever. Equally adept at plotting, Penny tells a story that featured the traditional closed group, in this case residents of a small, obscure town in Quebec province, peopled by smart, distinct characters. Slyly, Penny says that no one can find this idyllic town on a map, but that it lies near the Canadian/US border. As a long-time resident of New England, I was comforted by the familiarity of the climate and the geography.

I gobbled up the book, and went back for more. Yesterday I finished Bury Your Dead. Same basic cast, led by Chief Inspector Gamache, a French speaking investigator also fluent in English, enriched by the addition of residents of Quebec City. Here again, Penny handles the language skillfully, using just enough French to keep us cognizant of the characters' backgrounds and loyalties. The latter is important in this story because the main plot rests on the history of political struggle between French and English citizens of Quebec. Actually, main plot is a misnomer. This story has three plots and like the driver of a troika, the author never loses control as powerful steeds pull us along to the end where all three story lines finish in a flourish. The solitary murder is solved, a cold case is reopened and justice restored, and the wrenching story of a terrorist attack is told in flashbacks and in a penultimate scene that challenges the best action that any film could produce.

Beginning with the first of Penny's mysteries might be a good thing. I think I have inadvertently read a spoiler for whatever title lies between Still Life and Bury Your Dead, but the thing is, I'd reread these books anyway. That's not something I usually do. Once the puzzle is solved most murder mysteries hold little interest. But I'll reread Penny's books because they transcend their genre. May she live long and write much.

Foodies Unite & Write

We are very close to the end of the year and what follows is that post holiday slump when the bills come due and the excitement goes down the drain. Think about this: I hope to teach a continuing ed course at the Westminster (Colorado) campus of Front Range Community College. It starts mid-January: "The Literature of Food." We will meet Friday mornings for ten weeks, talk about food lit, do some reading and writing, enjoy the company of like-minded folks. Register on line for WRIT1006-001. There is no text; I'll hand out materials as we go.

As I went to check on the listing, I could not find it, but I have been assured that it will appear when the catalog for Spring 2012 is finished. If online registration fails you, call (303) 404-5000 and ask to be connected to the continuing ed department. And if this fails, email me: kvdbooks@gmail.com.

Cleaning Up My Own Mess

Writing is a messy business. Ideas breed like wild rabbits, papers overflow the in-basket, the out-basket and the recycle basket. Ink cartridges drain like desert aquifers. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh, my. And whose fault is this? Mine, of course. Not only is the mess of my making, but I cannot hire a house cleaner to tidy up after me. So, here's my writer's to-do list. Feel free to nag me if I don't report back that I've done these things before Santa comes. (Otherwise, I won't get that new Mercedes. Yeah, like I would anyway. I'll be driving my used Camry with a dented door until I die.)

• Finish the current book production project; all I need to do is reformat a couple of the poems and get the author to open her account on Create Space
• Find another book production/coaching client
• Update my submissions records on Duotrope and in my notebook
• Send out submissions of the new and the rejected poems
• File the food lit bibliography cards I've been tossing on top of the index card file
• Finish the cover design for my own next poetry chapbook; the text is done
• Select poems to read at Third Thursday at Forza open mike tomorrow
• Read and comment on the poems I've received for tonight's critique group
• Read the poetry book selected for our next poetry book club meeting at Boulder Books
• Figure out how to write reviews for Amazon
• Begin the script for the poetry theater which begins to roll out in February for presentation in April and get it to the director
• Update my website news page

Oh, looking at all of this, I think I need a nap. Or a walk with the dog. Maybe I need to make breakfast. Yeah, that's it. Must be low blood sugar that keeps me from tackling all this work. You listening, Santa? Oatmeal, now.

Catching Up with Robert Pirsig

I keep a small notebook full of titles that I intend to read. My list is a mishmash of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. One title that is not in that blue notebook is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The book is older than my grown son, but somehow in the crush of living I have missed it again and again. Until my friend Synchronicity recently stood it facing out on a display in my local library. Well, my book bag was heavy but not full, so I casually added it to the week's collection. And I read it. No, that's not true. I read most of it, no, I read much of it. I skipped a lot of the philosophy. Sorry, Pirsig, but for me the relationship between the author and his young son is more compelling.

If you have not read this much loved book, do so. Check the Wiki listing for Pirsig to get a summary of his background if you're not sure about the content. The book is far too complex for me to summarize effectively, because it's not just about motorcycles, nor is it just about philosophy. In the course of a road trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco, Pirsig explains his life and his philosophy of Quality and the Good. I preferred reading his history of having been mistreated by a too extensive use of ECT, now regarded as a safe and effective treatment for mood disorders and some psychotic disorders. Having had his memory purposefully erased, Pirsig has to deal with the ghost of his former self and the fear that his son, Chris, will also suffer from mental illness. Their journey is not an easy one, but by the end they seem reconciled. In the postscript we learn that Chris was killed during a mugging just before his 23rd birthday. That's not fair. But it's true. Yeah, that sentence is a spoiler, but the book is not about sudden epiphany. It's about the inner life of a brilliant mind almost lost to illness and unwise treatment, about a father/son relationship that reveals more than we might know about our own family dynamics.

Seasonal Affective Writer's Doldrums

The Doldrums are, according to American Heritage, a region near the equator characterized by calms, light winds, and squalls. Even though I'm sitting in my red desk chair, I'm there at some border like the equator. Sails flapping, rudderless, my internal weather lacks the gusto to carry me forward. A winter slough. Not depression, not grief, not existential angst, just feeling dull. What to do? What to do?

Do what I've long and often advocated for any writer in this leeward port dragging her anchor: keep the pen moving, even when what dribbles out is drivel. So for the past few days I have done my own version of free writing. I keep writing till I have three pages added to my journal, three lousy pages, a la Ann Lamott's shitty first drafts, although these don't even deserve the label draft, unless it's the cold air that leaks into old houses. It's lonesome at sea without my images and ideas. But if I keep at it, some mental gear will re-engage and my little boat of words will chug along and arrive at a beach party on the page. See, it's beginning to move already.

Adjectival Flu

You might remember your middle school language arts teacher encouraging the use of adjectives to "paint a picture" of whatever thing you were describing--furious Uncle Charles, beautiful Aunt Lily, the hungry turtle in the scummy pond. Well, scummy isn't bad, but the reader was forced to take your word for Charles's fury or Lily's beauty. The reality was short changed by the shorthand description, by a lazy adjective. Better far to share Charles's red face, the fists, the shouted expletives--spelled out in dingbats if necessary. Let Lily be lovely by her smooth skin, her cupid's bow mouth, her shining hair and wasp waist. There are adjectives, and then there are adjectives.

So often I see in first drafts that a writer is leaning on large, imprecise adjectives like pillows to avoid crafting language that reveals rather than conceals the textures, characters, and actions s/he is trying to coax to life on the page. This avoidance annoys me especially in poetry, where concision and high energy are, for me, absolute values. That the sky is blue, rather than gray, is useful, but what good in a poem is a word like inevitable or intense? And, no, I'm not prejudiced against words beginning with in. My bias is for precision and too often adjectives are flacid and general. Even blue--what blue, the blue that hurts the eyes at noon, blue edging toward dusk, blue between the clouds? If we must have them, let the adjectives go through a security check at the gate: are they really as precise as a three ounce tube of toothpaste? If not, please deposit them in the bin provided.

PS: I have posted that reading list for culinary fiction I promised a few days ago. Hit the "Free Downloads" page above.

Food Writing Luncheon

We went to hear from a panel of professional food writers. We went to meet and eat. We went to share what we know about the world of food writing. And guess what? Even the experts had never met anyone who writes poems about food. Nor had they heard of my favorite food fiction. I had something to offer! I even called myself a food poet, a little stretch, but with a poetry book titled The Great Hunger, I felt justified. And immediately someone said, "I didn't know there was such a genre." So now I'm a genre unto myself. Try putting that on a resume or CV.

Actually, I don't own the genre. There's Diane Wakoski's The Butcher's Apron and Carolyn Jennings' Hunger Speaks, and a periodical called Alimentum which is full of food poems. As for culinary fiction, I think that even Janet Evanovich could be stirred into this mix, given the amount of food consumed in each of the Stephanie Plum novels. Diane Mott Davidson is Colorado's own best selling food novelist. I could go on and on, but instead in a couple of days I'll post a list of foodie fiction and poetry for you to download.

Meanwhile, how do we get into these sorting and labeling situations? Shorthand, I suppose. It's easier to identify someone by her genre than to get to know her. Then someone else asked me to tell her in thirty words or less what I do. ("Let me count the ways.") Apparently, the correct thirty words came out of my mouth between bites of grilled chicken Caesar salad because she smiled and nodded. Now she can tell her friends that she sat next to a food poet whose interest is in our relationships with food. I've been pared down to a sidebar.

Drat! Curses! Coffee, stat!

Remember last post I promised a new page? Well, it would be easy to add a new page, but it wouldn't be a page to which I can post! So the food lit posts will be incorporated here on the main page of the blog. Let's drown our disappointment in a good cup of coffee, as in reading about a good cup of coffee. As in the Coffee House Mysteries by Cleo Coyle. She's up to ten books, all based on the queen of barristas, Clare Cosi, who manages The Blend, a high-end coffee house in Greenwich Village. All the requisite murder mystery characters are present: Clare, the amateur but highly effective sleuth, her handsome and undependable ex-husband, Matteo; their young adult daughter, Joy, and Mike Quinn, police detective and love interest for Clare. Oh, yes, and the doyen, Madame, Matteo's mother and owner of The Blend. You can visit and be wowed by the fast moving trailer built into the web site, or you can savor the aroma of murder and mocha at your own pace by curling up in that ubiquitous easy chair with a book and a cuppa.

In addition to providing well-paced action and consistently good characterization, these books have educated my about coffee. Isn't that one of the perks about a good novel? We learn something while we are being entertained. For instance, I may be the only person in our caffeinated world who was pleased and surprised to know that dark roasts have less caffeine than regular. Good for me, since I favor the dark roasts, that a bit of cream dropped into really fresh coffee will bloom, whereas the same bit of cream in stale coffee will sink under the oils that have floated to the top. That real espresso is made slowly, otherwise, you just have brewed coffee. I now know the difference between a latte and a macchiato--silly me for not having known before now that one is "marked" with the cream. The other one contains more milk.

This coffee science has to result from real knowledge on Coyle's part. I asked the barrista at my favorite coffee shop today about the importance of the crema--that light tan froth that floats on the surface of a well-pulled espresso. He nodded, like, duh! I could not write Coyle's stories convincingly because I don't know spit about running an espresso machine. So, Coyle ("she" is two people, a husband/wife team of writers) not only writes about what she obviously knows, but she knows what she's writing about. Good idea.

Feed the Read

You remember the phrase "made from scratch." It may have originated with the practice of scratching a line in the dirt to mark the beginning of a foot race, beginning at the beginning. This can be tricky. Carl Sagan said, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Well, I am not willing to go that far. Fortunately, in food prep we assume that some of the ingredients are ready made. I don't have to graft and plant the apple tree, wait for it to mature and the fruit to ripen. I don't have to pick the apples; I go to the market and pick out the apples. Same process applies in writing. We need not invent language and we pluck ideas from previous bits of text. None of us reinvents the cosmos to write a short story, although for some writers world building is their morning coffee, their "cup of tea."

Look at all the food references I've used here so far. That's because I love food, love language, love books about food. My last book was The Great Hunger. So, I plan a new page here at the Bookblog: FEED THE READ will focus on writers who specialize in food. They come in a cornucopia of varieties and I'll pick a few at a time to offer you. Our menu will include biography & memoir, fiction, history, food science, and any miscellaneous tidbits I find. I'll get this page on my plate within the next two or three days, so check back. It will be delicious.

Call of the Weird

Life gets angstful, right? Right? RIGHT! And some days I just want to run away, but I don't have the cash for that. I mean, as Robert Frost said, "Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in." So home is home, even when it's not the serene and lovely place we see in the carpet ads. And home right now in the US is not the American Dream. I'm angry and disappointed about the stalemate in DC, wish Warren Buffet would run for President, wish I had a voice loud enough to make a difference. I keep emailing my senators but they shoot back canned responses that have nothing to do with my thesis: our government is stalemated and when bread goes stale I feed it to the birds. It's for the birds, right? Right? RIGHT!

When my brain feels like it's on fire and there's no relief, I turn to murder. No, I don't intend to shoot anyone. That's ugly. I read mystery stories. Yesterday I checked out a bagful from the library and today I'll relax in the arms of homicide detectives. They solve problems, put bad guys away for a long time, and give me hope. They take my attention fully.This week I'll read six, four by Diane Mott Davidson and two by Cleo Coyle. These are culinary mysteries, the ones that focus on food, either as part of the plot or as part of the setting, not that these elements are separate in a well-written mystery. Davidson's sleuth is Goldie, a caterer in Colorado high country; Coyle's is the barista/owner of a lush coffee shop in Greenwich Village, NYC. So, while things are stonewalled in the real world, solution is possible between the covers of a good murder mystery.

My Friend Serendipity

Jung said, in effect, that there are few/no accidents. Things connect. I vote for Jung. Most recently it happened this way: over a year ago I attended an AWP convention in Denver. Like most attendees I came home laden with handouts, freebies, ideas and good memories. Among the things I unpacked and stashed were three copies of American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets. Since the unpacking they have been on my shelf, where I put them with intentions to read them "sometime." This weekend our household went into fall cleaning mode, which entailed energetic tossing of extra stuff. I sorted the shelves in my office and pulled those three journals, thinking that since I had not read them in over a year, they could go to the discard pile.

Something made me stop. I glanced at the contents on the covers and clutched them like long lost cousins before tenderly laying them on my reading pile, the one near my chair, the one that gets regular attention. In one copy was an essay by David Baker, whose book my poetry book club had read and discussed only two weeks ago. Baker's topic was "Where We Live in Poems." I've been working on a poem that was spawned by an intentional train trip wherein I rode from Boston to Denver, paying close attention to a sense of what America looks like from the tracks, let alone from the wrong side of them. The second one has an essay by James Galvin on "James Wright and the Poetry of Place." And the third has Rachel Zucker's piece on "The Long Poem." My train poem is long. How did I happen to have in hand exactly when I need it these three essays that will strengthen my poem immeasurably? Must be Jung looking down and smiling as he nudges things my way.

Lambs and Clams and Titles

Donald Murray, a writing teacher from New Hampshire, says in one of his text books that any piece of writing requires me to make a long list of possible titles, like 30 or 50. I'm happy if I have two or three. Sometimes finding even one title feels like relief from a headache. But titles matter. How can I find the poem in my computer files if the title isn't distinct? How can an editor believe that her table of contents won't put people to sleep before they dip into the text? So, what makes a good title for a poem or a story?

• Distinction--I want an individual name for a unique creation. I once had an editor tell me she very nearly rejected my poem because I had the word spring in the title and she was bored, bored, bored by spring poems. Lucky she read the poem and saw that it was unique and not just more lilacs-and-bluebirds sentimentality. Calling a poem "Spring" will not do.

• Another thing is the energy gap that the reader must bridge between the title and the text, and a well-chosen title can make for more energy in that gap, especially if the title both leads into the poem and creates tension. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" intrigues me and leads me into an elegy. Surprise! Energy in poems, says Stephen Dobyns, comes from surprise.
  

• Then there's tone. I had a real lol moment this week. I have a poem about the inevitable destruction that comes from human beings satisfying their appetites, a serious poem for a serious issue. I had called the poem "What Counts Mounts Up." My critique group critiqued that off the page, leaving me with a John Doe poem. It's in my revision folder, an unclaimed body in the morgue. But the imp of the perverse niggled my mind: I'll call this poem "The Sacrificial Clam." NO! Do not do that, my left brain shrieked, while my right brain giggled. Sigh, I won't do it.
  

Take any reputable anthology and study the list of titles. Which ones make you want to read the poems? Then study the relationship between the title and the text. Is it right? Will you remember it? Whitman, whether you like him or not, has good titles. Shakespeare has none, just a numbered list of sonnets, but he's Will Shakespeare, so, if we're smart, dedicated poets, we read his stuff anyway. You and I don't have that kind of name recognition. We have to study titles as if they are all we have. In a way they are.