Dan Wells's Blog, page 18

Week nine of #PoetrySummer, with bonus thoughts on ebook publishing

Sorry for the late post, but I've been busy; we'll talk about what I was busy with a little later, but if you read the title of the post I bet you can guess.

First, though, let's talk about Poetry Summer! Last week's poem was "The Walrus and the Carpenter," by Lewis Carrol, which was awesome and fun and kind of long and made me hungry for oysters. Alas, the next time I will feasibly eat any oysters is…October, maybe? At World Fantasy in San Diego? I'm brave enough to eat sushi in Utah, but oysters are another matter altogether; When I put them in my mouth I want them to still be dripping the seawater from when an old bearded man in a sou'wester pulled them out of the ocean.

My friend Brian, with whom I've been doing this, has been aiming at (and missing) "Ulysses," by Alfred Lord Tennyson, almost every week, and he has sworn in his wrath that this week he will finally do it. Given that Tennyson is awesome, I've decided to memorize a Tennyson poem as well, but I haven't picked one yet. I'm kind of hoping to avoid "Charge of the Light Brigade" just because it's so obvious, but on the other hand "The Lady of Shallot" is really long (plus, if I memorize that one I'll have to recite it while floating down a river, and then Gilbert Blythe will see me and I'll feel SO EMBARRASSED). So anyway, I'll do something Tennyson this week, and then, because theme weeks are fun, next week will be Shakespearean sonnets, and the week after that will be Harlem Renaissance. If you want to join us in our theme-ishness, plan accordingly.

Now, let's talk about ebooks. Last week I asked for advice on how to put together an ebook: how to format them, how to post them online, the whole shebang, and I got a lot of good advice, and I'll be compiling that advice into a post sometime soon. Now, let me tell you why I was asking.

Many years ago I wrote a book, which I thought was pretty good; it was actually the first book I ever submitted to Moshe Feder, the man who would eventually become my editor at Tor, and he rejected it; this was smart of him, because it was not very good. I really liked that book, though, and I've revamped it a few times over the years, and last year I got it to the point where I thought it was good enough to finally get published, so I sent it to my agent and she loved it, and we sent it around and found a lot of editors who loved it, but we only managed to actually sell it in one place: Germany, obviously, since that's my main market. The story in every other market, and every other publisher, was inevitably some variation of this: the book is very weird and quirky, and one editor would fall in love with it's quirkiness, but could then never convince any of the other editors to take the risk and publish it. This told us that there was obviously some kind of market for the book, just maybe not a very big one and certainly not a mainstream one. This, we decided, sounded exactly like the kind of situation where a self-published ebook would be the perfect way to go.

I've been fascinated by the ebook revolution, and I've wanted to dip my toe in the water for a while now, and this was the ideal opportunity. There is still a chance that we can sell it to a traditional publisher, especially with the renewed interest brought on by the German sale, and I've given my agent a few more weeks to see what she can do. Once we hit WorldCon, however, I will officially launch the book and start selling it online; I'll be pushing it very heavily at WorldCon and DragonCon, and of course online. If we manage to land a traditional publishing deal for it later on, huzzah; the state of ebooks right now does not preclude the possibility of a print deal after the fact. What I'm interested in seeing, though, is whether or not a self-published ebook, for an author like me who already has a pretty good platform to sell from, can mimic or outright replace the income from a traditional print book. Obviously it can, because it's happened before; my goal is to see how duplicatable that kind of success really is.

And what book, you ask, will I be selling online? I'll post more info in the future as we get closer to the launch, but if you're a Writing Excuses listener and you've heard us talk about "the vampire bunny book," well…it doesn't actually have vampire bunnies in it. See? Even the nickname is quirky.

My Hugo Votes

You have about 10 days left to submit your official Hugo ballot, which I have just done. I didn't vote in every category, but here are my picks:

Best Novel: FEED, by Mira Grant

I loved FEED, and the author herself articulated exactly why: "I tried to write a horror novel, but it came out as hard SF." She also tried to write a zombie novel that came out as a political thriller, and it is that combination of cool, traditionally disparate themes, executed so perfectly, that made me love this book. You'll see that that's a strong theme in my picks today–I love what I call "audacity," the writer's willingness to pull out all the stops and show me something wild and creative that I've never seen before. FEED did that for me in a way the other nominees didn't, which a pretty amazing feat in a collection of science fiction and fantasy books.

Best Novelette: THAT LEVIATHAN WHOM THOU HAST MADE, by Eric James Stone

I've raved about this story many times, but let me put in context of my "audacity" theme: it's the story of a Mormon minister in the center of the sun, helping a congregation of tri-gendered plasma entities deal with a cultural acceptance of rape. This is a writer who doesn't pull his punches or shy back from big topics. Great stuff, and superbly written.

Best Short Story: FOR WANT OF A NAIL, by Mary Robinette Kowal

An SF story that starts like a techno-thriller on a generation ship and ends up being a story of Alzheimer's and euthanasia, in many more ways than one. Maybe it's because I used to live with my grandfather while he had Alzheimer's, taking care of him and making sure he ate and got dressed and didn't hurt himself, watching him slowly erode into a hollow shell, but I really responded to this story. An easy pick for best of the year.

Best Related Work: WRITING EXCUSES, SEASON 4, by Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells

I voted for this one because it's me, obviously, but also because it's super awesome. To the max.

Best Graphic Story: SCHLOCK MERCENARY: MASSIVELY PARALLEL, by Howard Tayler and Travis Walton

A long-form space opera with great characters, a solid SF story, and a punchline every day? Every SF fan should be reading this.

Best Editor, Long Form: Moshe Feder

Moshe is my editor, and he's done a great job with the books. My number two pick in this category is Lou Anders, who's pretty much single-handedly made Pyr into a genre powerhouse. Both excellent editors.

Best Professional Artist: Daniel Dos Santos

This was a very hard choice for me, as I'm also a big fan of Picasio and Martiniere. In the end it came down to Dos Santos as my favorite, with the other two as 2 and 3, respectively.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

Yes, I know that INCEPTION is going to win, and it's definitely a great movie with a powerful SF concept. But SCOTT PILGRIM, again, had the audacity and the newness and the balls-to-the-wallness that I love to see in fiction, and in genre fiction especially. INCEPTION is a great thriller, but I've seen thrillers before; HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON was as good a version of the hero's journey as I've ever seen before, which is saying a lot, but it was, at the end of the day, something I've seen before. SCOTT PILGRIM was nothing I've ever seen before–nothing even similar to anything I've seen before. Everything about it was fresh and new and exciting and jubilantly creative. Huzzah.

Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Dan Wells

I bet none of you saw this coming. Dan Wells' books have literally changed my life, and it's a pleasure to be able to vote for him. My runner-up choices in this category were Larry Correia and Lauren Beukes, both excellent writers and great people. And if they beat me I can make their corpses disappear forever.

Week Eight of #PoetrySummer

I have conquered Prufrock! It was gargantuan, and it was kind of spread out over two weeks, but I memorized the whole text of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In your face, modernism!

As always happens, memorizing the poem helped me to understand and appreciate it better. That's such a wonderful poem. I've read it half a billion times, and memorizing it I swear there are parts I'd never even seen before. weird. Also of note, and I bet most of the Poetry Summer participants would agree, memorizing the poems has gotten easier every week. Hooray for exercising your memory!

This week's poem is similarly long, but much simpler because it's divided into discrete stanzas, it has a solid rhyme and rhythm, and I've already got about half it: "The Walrus and the Carpenter," by Lewis Carrol. I won't post the whole text here because it's huge, but you can read it here.

Warning: Extreme Sports Geekery Ahead

It's virtually impossible to make Americans care about soccer, and even harder to make them care about women's sports, but seriously: you should all be watching the Women's World Cup. Many of you watched the World Cup last year, and really got into it, and in many ways the Women's version is even better: the games are thrilling, there's no vuvuzelas, and the players look like this:

That's not just eye candy, that's Hope Solo, one of the best goalies in the history of the game–of either gender (plus her name makes her sound like a descendant of Han, which is awesome). On the American team, she's backed up by two of the three top scorers in the Cup, giving us one of the strongest teams in the world and a favorite to win the whole tourney this year. The other top scorer in the Cup is Marta Vieira da Silva, leader of the Brazilian team and also heavily favored to win. On Sunday they played each other in the quarter-finals, and it was one of the best, most exciting, most maddening games I've ever seen.

The Men's World Cup was famous last year for having bad calls, leading to accusations of corruption and, eventually, a public apology, which NEVER happens. The game this week between Brazil and the US was similarly riddled with questionable calls, but they happened to both sides and, in the end, the refs seemed like they were doing a fairly good job. The game started with Brazil accidentally knocking the ball into their own goal just 1 minute and 17 seconds into the match–the second earliest goal in World Cup history. I know I just said that the Brazilian team was awesome, and now I'm saying they started the match by giving away a goal; well, this was that kind of match. The US fought long and hard and crazy, finally scoring their second goal a full two hours later, the latest goal in World Cup history, giving them, in the process, the longest gap between goals in a single match in, as far as I know, the history of soccer. That's a weird record to hold, but there you go, and it's not one likely to be beaten anytime soon since most matches don't even go that long. It was, as I said, that kind of a match.

The US held Brazil to zero for the first half, and then in the second the ref went insane and called a red card on a US player who fouled a Brazilian while blocking a shot mere feet from the US goal. There was no way that kind of foul was red-card worthy, but because it happened inside the goal box a yellow card gets automatically upgraded to a red card, so I suppose it was kind of excusable–if you believe that it was even yellow-card worthy, which some of the commentators didn't. So it was a suspect call, but not a ridiculous one depending on who you talk to. The next call, on the other hand, was awful. See, when a player gets a red card two things happen: first, that player is ejected from the game, and the team is not allowed to replace them, so the US were now playing with only ten people on the field instead of eleven. Second, because the red card happened in the goal box, the Brazilians got a penalty kick: one kicker versus one goalie, with no outside help, at extreme close range. It's incredibly hard to block a penalty kick, so this was practically like giving the Brazilians a free goal–except that the US goalie is Hope Solo, who can block anything. She deflected the shot, the crowd cheered like mad, and the ref blew the whistle and said it didn't count because Solo had moved too early. The commentators, at this point, went back and ran through the footage over and over again, looking for any sign that she had moved early, but she was steady as a rock. The ref was determined to give Brazil a goal. For its second attempt Brazil sent in Marta, the top scorer in the world, and got the point. The game was tied, there was half an hour left to play, and the US was down a player. Things looked horribly unwinnable. But the US team never gave up.

When you're short a player you have to choose: you're going to have a weak spot regardless, so do you put it on attack or defense? With the game tied, the US couldn't afford to slack on offense, so they put all their strength up front and trusted Solo to pick up the slack. She did so more than admirably. The second half finished with a tie, sending the game into two 15-minute blocks of overtime. Marta managed to land the craziest shot I've ever seen, kicking it over her head and backward to hook up, pass the defenders, and drop into the top corner of the goal like magic. She really is an amazing player, and if she'd made the shot just one minute earlier it would have won them the game, but overtime had already started, and they had to play the full 30 minutes. 30 minutes later, after almost a full hour of 10-vs-11 desperation, the US landed a crazy goal of their own, with a Hail Mary pass from Megan Rapinoe turning into a gorgeous headshot from Abby Wambach, the US team captain.

Not only did this goal happen after the normal time had ended, it technically happened after the overtime had ended, in what's called stoppage time. See, in soccer, there's none of the constant time-outs and whatnot that you see in games like American football; if the players stop playing for any reason, like a substitution or an injury or even a pause while the ref makes a call, the clock keeps running, and the refs keep track of all this wasted time and then add it on at the end. After Brazil made it's overtime goal they decided to slow the game down as much as they could, playing around with the ball and keeping it away from the Americans as much as possible, on the theory that every second they don't have the ball is a second they can't use to score. This reached a ridiculous extreme toward the end as two different Brazilian players, within about five minutes of each other, collapsed in apparent agony and called for medics and stretchers to carry them off the field. If you can find the footage somewhere (I searched everywhere, but it's not up yet), the second Brazilian to do this was awesome: she's standing near the back line, twenty yards from the nearest opponent, and just keels over for no reason. The medics come out, the refs go over, they strap her into the stretcher, and about three minutes later they finally get her off the field, at which point she jumps up, runs to the bench for a drink, and then COMES RIGHT BACK ONTO THE FIELD. In a game renowned for its cheap "ow I've been hurt" fakeouts, this was the fakiest fake of a time-wasting improv show you will ever see. The refs didn't call a penalty on her for it, but they added the full three minutes to the end of the game, and that is when the Americans finally scored their second goal. When you score in the 122nd minute of a game that's only supposed to be 90 minutes long, that's pretty much the definition of "never giving up."

With overtime over and the game still tied, the game goes to penalty kicks, which as I said are incredibly hard to block. Each team gets five shots, and whoever makes the most wins the game. Once again, Hope Solo showed us just how good she really is, and managed to block two of them. One of the blocked shots, in a sad/ironic coincidence, came from Daiane, the same Brazilian player who scored the own-goal at the beginning of the game, more or less ensuring that she'll spend the rest of her life blaming herself for Brazil's loss. I also imagine she got a few wedgies in the locker room, assuming women give wedgies. Sad Daiane aside, the US team won the match and moves on to the semifinals tomorrow, playing France. you can bet I'm going to be watching.

So: one of the best teams in the world gives up an own-goal and loses to a team that doesn't even have all its players. The game goes into overtime even though one team has technically never made a goal. The refs are inscrutable and the players are deceitful. Why did I love this match so much? Because it embodies everything I love and hate about soccer. It was thrilling, start to finish, and the players involved are just so dang GOOD. Yes, most of the goals came from what looked like pure luck, but it takes an incredibly talented team to create those lucky opportunities and then capitalize on them. Either of those teams, on that day, in that zone of excellence, would have demolished any other team they played against, but because they were playing each other the skill and the zaniness were catalyzed into a ball of chaos, and the fun came from watching both teams give it everything they had and somehow manage to control the uncontrollable. It's like watching a bull rider: the slightest mistake will get them killed, but they hang on and do their best and make it work.

I love this game. Time for a soccer party tomorrow evening.

Week Seven of #PoetrySummer

So…. Why did the updates stop on day 2 last week? Because I went camping and forgot to take my iPad with me. We had service (it wasn't far enough from civilization to ruin the 3G access), so I could have updated if I'd brought it, but I didn't, so no updates and no Prufrock (the poem was also on my iPad, so without it I had nothing to memorize). (I rely on my iPad for pretty much everything, if that wasn't obvious.)

So sorry, no Prufrock for you. I managed to save last week by memorizing something else, and I'll be doing Prufrock again this week. What did I memorize last week? One of my favorite childhood poems, "Disobedience" by A. A. Milne:

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

"Mother," he said, said he;

"You must never go down to the end of the town,

if you don't go down with me."

James James

Morrison's Mother

Put on a golden gown,

James James

Morrison's Mother

Drove to the end of the town.

James James

Morrison's Mother

Said to herself, said she:

"I can get right down to the end of the town

and be back in time for tea."

King John

Put up a notice,

"LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!

JAMES JAMES

MORRISON'S MOTHER

SEEMS TO HABE BEEN MISLAID.

LAST SEEN

WANDERING VAGUELY

QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,

SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF THE TOWN

– FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!

James James

Morrison Morrison

(Commonly known as Jim)

Told his

Other relations

Not to go blaming him.

James James

Said to his Mother,

"Mother," he said, said he,

"You must never go down to the end of the town

without consulting me."

James James

Morrison's Mother

Hasn't been heard of since.

King John

Said he was sorry,

So did the Queen and Prince.

King John

(Somebody told me)

Said to a man he knew:

"If people go down to the end of the town, well,

what can anyone do?"

(Now then, very softly)

J. J.

M. M.

W. G. du P.

Took great

C/o his M*****

Though he was only 3.

J. J.

Said to his M*****

"M*****," he said, said he:

"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-

if-you-don't-go-down-with ME!"

Day 2 of Prufrock

Yesterday's section was easy. Here's the next one, more than twice as big:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Week Six of #PoetrySummer and Day 1 of Prufrock

Last week my friend and I memorized Spanish poems, both of us choosing Pablo Neruda. Memorizing the poem was surprisingly easy, either because I'm getting better at this or because Neruda is a really awesome poet. I think it's mostly the latter. The fun part about memorizing these poems has been seeing for the first time the underlying structure of each one. "Puedo Escribir Los Versos Mas Tristes Esta Noche" has been kind of daunting to me, because it repeats a lot of lines and thoughts, sometimes exactly and sometimes with a slight twist, which makes the poem very cool and dreamlike but, by extension, kind of hard to wrap your head around. Memorizing it forced me to find all of the inner logic, and I like the poem even more now. That's kind of becoming a theme with every poem I memorize.

This week's poem, as previously announced, is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This is a huge poem, and memorizing it in a single week is going to be really hard, so I've broken it down into seven pieces. If you're playing along at home, here's the piece to memorize today; it's nice and short to make it easy on the holiday.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

I'll come back tomorrow with part 2. If you're memorizing something else this week, let us know.

Week 5 of #PoetrySummer

Last week I memorized "Here, Bullet" by Brian Turner, and as typically happens I came away with a heightened appreciation for the poem. Brian Turner was a soldier in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan; I forget his full bio), and wrote about his experiences in several poems, many of them grouped into his award-winning collection HERE, BULLET. I like a lot of the poems in the collection, but there's a reason "Here, Bullet" is the one they named it after. It's really excellent.

The first thing you notice is the title, which is daring and almost playful, like he was calling a dog. The poem begins with that same sense of daring, essentially calling out the bullet to come and get him. After that, though, the poem begins line by line to devalue the human life and body: he's not a person, he's "bone and gristle and flesh," describing the processes of life not as a glorious whole but as a sum of mechanical facts. The middle section focuses even less on the body, seeing it only as the bullet sees it: an "adrenaline rush," and a "puncture into heat and blood." By the final section the body has become nothing but the other half of the gun–one throws the bullet, and one catches it–with both halves blending into each other.

And then you get the final line: "Because here, bullet, here is where the world ends, every time." Not only is he recontextualizing the title ("here" no longer means "come here, little bullet" but "me, myself, the thing that is here"), but he gives back to the human life all of the glory he had taken away from it, and then some. A human death is not just a ceasing of mechanical processes, it's the end of a world. The last two words, "every time," are what make the entire poem work, because they make it clear that every human life is a world unto itself–that even though the bullet doesn't end the entire world, it ends that one person's entire world, and isn't that just as bad? Putting a single death on the same level as the end of the world elevates the importance of that single life. It's a tragic poem, but an uplifting one, and a very brave one. I love it.

Next week, if you recall, is our "Prufrock" week, and I hope one or two of you have decided to memorize it with us, but this week, pretty much on a whim, we decided to memorize poems in Spanish. I used to live in Mexico, so I'm fairly fluent (though not as fluent as I used to be) and I've read some excellent Spanish-language poetry. I'm not super well-read in the genre, though, so I've got good news and bad news: the bad news is, my choice is pretty obvious, both for poet and poem; the good news is, it's one of the most beloved poets worldwide. I'm speaking, of course, of Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda lived in Chile, where he was justifiably famous, and eventually came to worldwide attention in part because he was a political exile from one or more of the various military coups in the country. He's a pretty popular character, too. In one of my favorite books, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS by Isabel Allende, he is a background character known only as "the poet." In the Italian movie Il Postino, he spends some of his exile on a small Italian island and helps his mailman woo the woman he loves. His readings, especially in his home country once they allowed him back in, would attract thousands of people, like a rock concert, and they would all listen intently for the Big One, the favorite poem that everyone loved, and when he finally started it the crowd would cheer loud enough to shake the rafters: "Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche…." the title more or less translates to "Tonight I can write the saddest lines," and it comes from his wonderful collection TWENTY LOVE POEMS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR. Here is the full text in Spanish, though you can find a translation pretty easily if you poke around:

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche está estrellada,

y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos."

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos.

La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.

Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.

Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.

La noche esta estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.

Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.

Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.

Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.

Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.

Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos,

mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa,

y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.

That's a long poem, and it's not my first language, so it's going to be hard, but honestly: we didn't resolve to memorize a poem every week because we thought it would be easy, right? Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. Also, we finally sold Spanish rights to the John Cleaver books, so I feel like celebrating. Vamonos!

Week Four of #PoetrySummer

Poetry Summer, for those who don't know, is my goal and challenge to memorize a poem every week this summer. So far it's going great, and lots of people have joined in.

The great thing I'm learning as I memorize these poems is that no matter how much I liked them before, I like them even more as I go through them and commit them to memory. This week I did John Keats's "To Autumn;" he's a poet I love, but that's a poem of his I don't know as well as some others. I'd always given it the very cursory reading of "each stanza is about a different sense," and that's still true, but as I studied it this week I saw that it was so much more. It's about how Autumn is the time of harvest and food and warm, lazy days, but it's also about how Autumn is the death of summer, and the last mournful pause before the world slips into winter and everything grows old and cold and dead. In the first stanza there are apples on the trees, and in the second the apples are crushed in a press, and by the third the fields are stubble and the sun is setting and the world is going to sleep.

The third and final stanza is hushed and still; the only verbs are soft sounds, like the "wailful choir" of gnats, and then suddenly a vast flock of birds lift up from the trees and flap south for the winter. This last line is my favorite, because he never comes right out and says it and yet you can see it, and hear it, because the structure of the poem creates the image so perfectly in your mind. We start with the setting sun, and the wailful choir, and already your mind starts to think of quietness and stillness. Saying it out loud you can't help but lower your voice. The penultimate line is about a single bird whistling in a garden–a soft, static, solitary image–and then the final line has an entire gathering of swallows up in the skies, chirping and singing. This sudden shift of one bird to many, from whistle to twittering, from garden to sky, creates a strong visual image of a flock of birds suddenly lifting up and flying. It's gorgeous, and brilliant, and if I didn't think it was possibly to love Keats any more than I already did, well, "To Autumn" has proven me wrong.

My friend came over and we recited our poems to each other (he did the sixth section of "A Song of Myself"), and we realized that two of my three poems have been about nature, and all three of his have been about death. We decided that for this week we'd switch topics, so I've spent the last few days looking for a good death poem. I settled on "Here, Bullet" by Brian Turner, the titular poem from the collection he wrote after serving multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The entire collection is wonderful (I especially love his poem about the burning oilfield, but I can't remember the name of it), but I chose "Here, Bullet" because of it's direct connection to my theme of the week. And because the title alone is completely brilliant, and he gives it multiple meanings. Here's the full text:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta's opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you've started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

here is where the world ends, every time.

How did your third poem go? Any insights to share? I love reading the poems you guys link here, so keep 'em coming.

Week Three of #PoetrySummer

It is not my intention to turn this blog into pure poetry memorization and nothing else, but look on the bright side: at least I'm posting something. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I tend to set such a high standard for my blog posts that more often than not I just don't post anything because I know it won't be world-changingly brilliant. But that's a moot point during PoetrySummer because I can just post other people's poems, and they ARE brilliant! Huzzah! So thank you ee cummings for writing my blog for me is I guess what I'm saying here.

Last week, as promised, I memorized cummings' "I carry your heart," and recited it to my loving wife, and she was suitably impressed. She didn't have time to do Langston Hughes "Mother to Son" like she'd wanted, but she did do Emily Dickinson's "Success Is Counted Sweetest," so we're both still on track. My daughter memorized A.A. Milne's "Twinkletoes," because she's awesome.

This week I want to push myself a little harder, so I'm going to memorize "To Autumn" by John Keats. If I had to pick a favorite poet in the universe, it would be a very hard call between Keats and Emily Bronte, but in the end I'm pretty sure Keats would win. His facility with language and the richness of his imagery is just stunning. "To Autumn" is a great example, with three stanzas each focusing on a different sensory experience of Autumn: smell, sight, and sound. It's a perfect confluence of form and purpose; every line, every word, every mechanical element is aimed directly at the evocation of a specific place and time and mood. Here's the full poem:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

    With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

    And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

        For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

    Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

    Steady thy laden head across a brook;

    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring?  Ay, where are they?

    Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

    And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

    Among the river sallows, borne aloft

        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

This is a good time to announce an upcoming sub-challenge within the larger umbrella of PoetrySummer. While Keats and Bronte may be my favorite poets, my favorite poem of all time is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. I even used it in the epigram of I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER. As this is also the favorite poem of my friend Brian, with whom I am doing this challenge, we decided to set a specific week and memorize the whole, gigantic poem together. That week is the first full week of July, ending on the 10th, and you are encouraged to join us; I'm letting you know now in case you want to get a headstart on the memorization, but don't neglect your intervening poems if you do. "Prufrock" is not easy, to memorize or even to understand, but it's gorgeous and brilliant and sad and incredibly powerful, and I feel like I learn something new from it every time I read it. I won't reproduce the entire thing here, but you have Google; do yourself a favor and look it up.