Marly Youmans's Blog, page 145

A Prezified poem--

Gary Dietz, a former student from eons ago when I had a brief incarnation as teacher has put one of my poems into Prezi. Go see the results. I'll turn off comments--give him any, please!

The Flute Seller

Today I visited Windy Skies for the first time and encountered the figure of an itinerant peddler, attempting to sell his flutes in the midst of Indian traffic. The image struck me as an apt metaphor for the poet in the 21st century—a wanderer with a sheaf of songs and hand reaching out with a handmade gift while the world whirls by, faster and faster, not like a dervish but like a manic child's

Tweaking the Romantics

The two photographs are courtesy of Sofie Laier Henrikson
of Copenhagen and sxc.hu. Shelley's body was burned on the shore
(quarantine laws) after he drowned.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

What a silly, Romantic thing to say!  Just the sort of Shelleyesque thing that Shelley would go and say, don't you think? I suppose all poets have lived

Sunday, sundry--

Photographs by Mary Morris Youmans.
My Sunday afternoon shenanigans--

By the time you read this, I may well be tootling past the Saratoga battlefield, on my way to summer camp. The mother of three is a perennial ferrywoman... And the youngest child of three is busy, busy, busy.  He has a lot of excess energy to discharge after a year of football, wrestling, hurdling, high jump, and relay.

Why

More "The Book of the Red King" poems

Two tales of the Fool, "The Yellow Day" and "The Silver Cord," are up at Lucid Rhythms, edited by poet and  fiction writer David Landrum.

Dreaming, hand-in-hand with François Houtin

This little post mailed to the universe at large doesn't really need to be anything but an arrow pointing to François Houtin and Galleria del Leone. I'm not sure how I survived in the world so long without knowing his intricate etchings that have all the rightness of dreams and sometimes remind me of something he must have seen by looking through one of those fey stones with a hole worn through

Pilfered from facebook--Laura Murphy Frankstone & "The Throne of Psyche"

Illustrations in this post:  a peek at Laura's paintings at her beautiful site, Laurelines. If you don't know it, you should! She is an artist who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (a place where I have lived three times in my life, and where my youngest child was born.) Oddly, I met her after I moved to Cooperstown, New York. Poet Jeffery Beam introduced me to her site years before we met.

Tracy Roberts does it again!




The illustration is Papa Gatto, "program spokescat,"
from Ruth Sanderson's book, Papa Gatto.

If you have a better memory than I do, you might remember that about a year ago I talked about one of the MFA students I worked with at Hollins while a writer-in-residence there. She won The Shirley Henn Award at The Francelia Butler conference at Hollins for a story, "Head-on," that we had gone

Marketing poetry books: helpful links

Here are the links promised in "The Peddler's Comedy, a post about doing events for The Throne of Psyche and discovering that I know nothing about the conjunction of selling and poetry.  Hence, the digging-about for knowledge...  If you desire the introduction and lots of sometimes-indignant comments, go there first!

Feel free to argue, object, or add a link of your own. Although I have rooted

Rattiness abounds

I am delaying the post with links promised yesterday until tomorrow because I must say that the ever-generous Dave Bonta with his sneaky little recorder has made me the Woodrat Podcast of today. You may scurry rat-like to Via Negativa and hear me and novelist Clare Dudman and Dave and rooks.