Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 48

Gods of Water and Air - The Once-and-Future Book

I've made it conclusive: my poetry collection, once to be published by the now-closing Kitsune Books, is now available. I can't go with a two-month publication life for my book, which is the only possibility with Kitsune, as they are closing on December 31 and my book was to come out November 5.

It's a funny feeling, starting over, with a fully finished book -- complete with blurbs and cover art. The process of sharing about this misadventure has made me aware of the fragility of poetry publishing. As a cultural phenomenon, it's on the bubble, nearly nonexistent in terms of media. I heard of some similar problems at Calyx Books, the publisher's ill health and a lack of funding making the future uncertain. So many of these concerns are run by one or a few dedicated poets who give 150% -- an admirable but not always sustainable model in the long-term. Still, I have to admire people like Anne Petty at Kitsune Books who have made small press publishing a wonderful alternative to the corporation-dominated media, and who have kept literary publishing alive. University presses, now feeling the budget heat too, are folding or cutting back in distressing numbers. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, not an extinction, I feel.

Poet Left at the Altar - Chapter 3

My experience with Kitsune Books has left me thinking a lot about the state of poetry publishing and the poetry community -- its coherences and divisions, its fragility, and its lack of a viable economic structure.

A spider is building a web on the other side of the table outside where I write this. I don't like spiders, but I have no heart for destroying his morning's diligent work, the kind of work I do when I sit down to face my own heart and mind and turn those flowing currents into words. He struggles, he goes back and forth, knotting the invisible into something that can catch things so he'll have a dinner. Could be a she, I don't know with spiders. But I see the invisible and seemingly fragile web of poetry publishing in his/her labor. So easily swept aside by chance, someone walking through the web they can't see. Some life event like illness or death or university budget cutbacks that closes a press and leaves authors and their books stranded.

We have always had poetry, but poetry publishing in books has only been available to a general audience for a few hundred years, a short time in its total history. Maybe we need to look past the vehicle to the substance and find a way to create a more vibrant poetry culture that is independent of individuals, university budgets, indie bookstores, distributors, etc., etc. Maybe we should leave the printing press behind entirely. It has served a great purpose, but does it serve poetry now?

The Poet Left at the Altar - Chapter 2

It seems Gods of Water and Air won't published this November after all. Kitsune Books is closing its doors shortly thereafter and the situation would orphan my book, taking it out of print after only a month and a half. So I have to accept this loss and move on. Here's another poem from the book that almost was -- maybe the once-and-future book? Thanks to Georgetown Review, which first published the poem.

Squabble
We squabble over a word’s meaningand history’s precedents while outside, contained in tidy pots, golden roses open their blouses. Daisies spin aroundbright wheels, each petal uniqueas a last exclamation.
Squabble with lifewhen we could descend like Monet into its round dot, open a doorand find a tiny gray feather whose shaft is the perfect arc.
Squabble, when we could arch like that? Be a tiny, shining spine’scatenary curve.I used to gather weedsfrom the fields, their disordera squabble of vowels, but now see wisdom in roundness, a floating truthlike a lily on a pond.

The fragility of the small press poetry community is on my mind in a new way after this experience. How many poets are publishing with operations that leave them buying their own books to sell, with chain bookstores emperiling the indepedents, many of whom won't carry poetry anymore because it doesn't sell. We live in a fragile poetry world, sustained, though by the sense of community that increases as the economic uncertainties close presses and booksellers down. What will save poetry? because it has survived throughout history and surely will never die. I think this medium in which you're reading, is poetry's new frontier. I hate to say it, but print is really dying. Perhaps to arise in a new form -- downloadable, printable eBooks of poetry? I have one on my phone already.

Curiosity Gets Us Farther Than Ever

Big morning for a Rocket Kid! The successful landing of the Mars Rover Curiosity made me proud to be the daughter of a rocket scientist. Proud to have grown up with a guy who blew up missiles for a living. Proud to feel that American innovation is breaking boundaries and pushing back the margins of the known world once again. I sit here typing on something more powerful than what they used to send men to the moon about half a century ago. And it's because we did that that I am typing on this little power machine. Mars Rover Lands After Seven Seconds of Terror.

My Cheshire Cat Poetry Book

I've had a poetry publishing mishap. A rather major one. The publisher with whom I signed a contract a year ago to publish Gods of Water and Air, my new collection, will fold as of December 31. There is still the promise that my book will appear on November 5, but less than two months later, no publisher will be there to keep it in print, distribution, and provide publicity of any kind. I have a Cheshire Cat of a book, it seems. A now-you-see-it-now-you-don't publication. I am in mourning, even though some copies will be printed. Here is one of the poems, with a recording, from a book you may or may not ever see. If you like it, please leave me a comment! I may keep all comments and re-publish the book myself after January 1.

"Every Morning I Try" first appeared in The Cortland Review:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/4...

Bloghopping - Sunday meandering

Diane Lockward's marvelous Blogalicious has an interesting exploration of Diane's poem about a bumblebee, and how Adele Kenny blogged about it and it found its way into an Italian translation. Diane even has a movie of the poem. I love it when poems transmogrify into other things -- videos, illustrations to an illustration, and increasingly little animated movies.

Speaking of Adele Kenny, her blog has an intriguing poetry prompt today about towns and home. And if you're looking for more poetry prompts, Jeff Newberry has a list of 15 prompts I really like. They're quirky but not weird-quirky, food for thought but not pedantic. One of the them already started off something that has been bouncing around in my head: "Write about your favorite day of the week." Mine's Saturday. Because it's so far from Monday.

Happy Sunday!

To Rome

First he did Paris. Now my favorite city, Rome. I can't wait to see Woody Allen's new film To Rome With Love. It will inspire me to tweak the descriptions in my novel, but I bet he didn't do much with St. Peter's in the movie. How would you describe that largest church in Christianity? I have been wrestling with descriptions of this monumental Renaissance and Baroque piece of sacred architecture that covers more than five acres under its roof and boasts one of the best pieces of sculpture ever created, Michelangelo's Pieta.

Bloghopping

Found a wonderful new zine that spans cultural matters, from film, theater, dance, and plays, to poetry and fiction, to reviews and critical essays. Scene 4 Magazine, based in England, is a rich offering of international voices, views, and images. In the June issue, my favorite is a poetry feature by a friend --  four surreal, witty poems by Alan Kleiman. Take a look at What A Holiday and enjoy a fun ride.

Sheryl Luna's blog, Dialectical Migrations, yesterday made some good points about Post-Modernism: what is it and what isn't it. Have we moved even beyond that? Luna, whose first collection Pity the Drowned Horses was published by University of Notre Dame Press, has received fellowships at Ragdale, Yaddo and the Anderson Center. I resonate with this statement she makes: "The Post-Modern moves beyond fragmentation and labeling. It is bigger than that. If anything we are all Post-Modern in our sensibilities, our true marginalization in American Poetries. There are simply too many people writing to create such divisions."

The Renaissance Club - Chapter Two, second half

Hoping to entice you with installments -- hey, it worked for Dickens! -- I present the second half of Chapter Two of my novel The Renaissance Club . In this section we meet some of the travelers as they wrestle with jetlag and various personal problems while trying to get to sleep on their first night in Italy. And downstairs in the hotel, a backroom deal is being made.

Chapter Two. Rome. Day One.
 
            Down the hall from the Perls, Art and Eva Manookian were in an even tinier room, and also suffering from jet lag, but in two different ways. Art had fallen into what appeared to be a coma and was snoring so loudly Eva thought it might be heard through the walls.             Eva was ferociously pacing figure-eights around the room and into the bathroom and back, her uncombed gray-blonde hair frizzed around her like an electric halo. With such magnificent energy, she could have painted all night, especially with Art asleep, leaving her in no danger of his wanting sex, the old satyr. But instead of being at her easel, she was trapped in this dark hotel room with no supplies and a brain full of images.             The ride from the airport into Rome had been stunning, unforgettable, and (Norman had been right here) indispensable to an understanding of the Renaissance and Italy with its new humanism. Ancient city walls jamming up next to medieval palazzos with rough-piled stone bases, an Egyptian obelisk rising in a Baroque fountain. Italy was a monstrous mess of beautiful art, you could never have guessed from the stately films. She loved this hodgepodge and wanted to take it all in, without a guide, thank you very fucking much. Frothing over with pictures, she felt the curse of the artist: to be unable to forget what you had seen.             Art’s snoring was driving her crazy. If he didn’t shut up, she was going to smother him with a pillow and make it look like a heart attack. She worked this scenario out while pacing. She often liked to fantasize ways to kill Art. For what? For his cheery calm, for his lack of internal torture. Sometimes for his shaved head and that little silver earring. He could annoyingly hip, especially when he was playing guitar with his jazz buddies. She could kill him cheerfully for that and for his fidelity and for her occasional lack of it. And for his being such an all-around good guy when she was a hot-tempered stinker. Yes, all good reasons. The judge would understand.            Who was she kidding, she would never paint again. If she had all the light of a midsummer day and a thousand canvases and art supplies that never ran out or dried up in the tubes, she’d never paint, hadn’t painted decently since Rebecca died. How do you make paintings after losing a child? Useless to paint mere things. Damn Art for being able to sleep. She knew what he would say if he saw her pacing like this, he’d know what she was thinking. She had stopped saying these things years ago, after he ordered her into therapy and she had come out of it exactly the same. When the painting stopped, that was the second end of her life. The only reason she had agreed to this cockamamey idea of Norman’s was hoping that maybe Italy could restore her imagination.             As she had the thought, the small crystal wall sconce seemed to smile at her like a Renaissance cherub, with all the lush sweetness of the period, and a kind of malevolence underneath that she liked. She glared at it until it again resolved itself into a crooked wall sconce.             She went to her suitcase on the stand and pulled out of an interior compartment a small plastic bag containing a small dollop of ashes. Art would be alarmed if he knew she had brought this bag with a pinch of Rebecca’s ashes to Italy. He would be alarmed because he could not understand that she was never going to stop what he called obsessively grieving. A mother just does not. It would make her feel Rebecca was still close if some tiny bit of her came with them on this trip.            It was time to rest, if she could not sleep, and without cherubs and madonnas, thank you. She needed a good, muscular Michelangelo to counteract all the sappy stuff. Or a martini, but it was too late now for that.             Down the hall from the Manookians, Sandra was in a different kind of hell. As one of only three single women, she had been forced for economy’s sake to share a room with Becca, the drama instructor, and her elderly, deaf sister Daphne. Beccas had brought her sister along because she felt she could not leave Daphne alone for three weeks. Becca spent the entire time they were getting undressed and into bed complaining about her departmental budget and the lavish expense of this trip. She had undressed quickly and then lay on her bed staring up at the ceiling, intoning her list of complaints while Sandra got into the bathroom when she could and then got into her bed.             Daphne, blissful in deafness, said nothing in reply to her sister.             Sandra lay on her bed listening and staring up as if she, too, were deaf. The complaints were probably intended for her to report to her father, but they bounced off the plate armor of her disinterest.            Suddenly she got up, startling both the muttering Becca and the nearly asleep Daphne. She stalked over to Daphne’s bed, pulled her suitcase out from under it and opened it on the floor next to the bed. Opening it, she began pawing through the contents, which had to be kept in the suitcase because there wasn’t enough room for her clothes in the one drawer allotted to her by the other two. She pulled out tee shirts and sweaters and skirts and bras until she came to a black thong and a demi-bra that matched it, the bra trimmed in tiny fuchsia ribbons. She laid these things out on the top of the bureau, on the jeans and sweater she had set out for tomorrow. Then she stomped back to her cot, turned her back to the room and putting the pillow over her head, fell asleep.             On the floor above Sandra, Marianna Waller had been long asleep in the very center of their small double bed when Rick found the farthest edge of wakefulness. Marianna’s dark wavy hair was spread like strands of cloud in a moonlit sky across the pillow and one arm flung above her head, her legs sprawled.             He stood up from where he had been huddled, still half dressed in his tee shirt and shorts, on the edge of the bed. . Marianna had rolled to the center and then stretched out. He hadn’t undressed all the way and still wore his heavy underwater watch.             Rick went over to the window and pulled back the heavy curtain to look out. Their window faced onto a small service courtyard and a wall of windows on the other side. Several were lit; travelers perhaps suffering jet lag. He looked down at his watch, which he had efficiently set for Rome time as soon as they had boarded the plane in San Francisco. Two forty-six a.m.            “There’s no reason to feel like this,” he heard himself say aloud.             It didn’t matter, because Marianna wore earplugs. The slightest noise could keep her awake and now that she was pregnant, her health was even more delicate and she needed her rest, the doctor told her, and she kept repeating.            He had a great job, a gorgeous wife, a fantastic house her parents had helped them build. He had just put Norman in his place. He stood at the window combing his long fingers through his thick brown hair that stood up spikey in the front of  his head, thanks to the mousse, giving him the look of a man whose thoughts electrified the air.            Suddenly he gave a sharp kick to Marianna’s pink suede tote bag in the corner next to him, then he grabbed his toes and hopped with pain for a few satisfied moments. He had succeeded in damaging it not in the least. He stalked over to his cell phone and furiously typed out a long text, then got back onto the bed and fell asleep.            In a room on the same floor as the Wallers, Norman and Kathleen weren’t sleeping either. Norman was working on his laptop while Kathleen paced in her pink nightgown and tossed out ideas.             “Hotel Scacciapensieri!” Kathleen said. “That’s even better than the hotel I booked for Siena. I can’t imagine we can get into it, but if we could, there would be no complaints. It’s got killer views of the walled city across the valley.”             “Really?” Norman asked. “Because you researched so many hotels in Siena, and I remember you saying there were no good alternatives.”             “I wanted us to be in the city, but we can’t and save money.”            “Okay, I’m looking online . . . Spell it.”            “You’re kidding, Norman. You know I can’t spell in English. I certainly don’t spell in Italian!”            “Well, say it again, slowly.”            “Ska-cha-pen-sor-i.”            “Hmm. That doesn’t sound the way you said it the first time.”            Kathleen turned and faced him, putting her hands on her narrow hips.             “Norman, just look it up. You’re the researcher. The internetist.”            “I’m an economist.”            “Whatever.”            “Okay, say it again. Slowly.”            “Sko-chow-pan-sier-y. For God’s sake can’t you find it? We could email and then call in the morning. This one might save us a lot. And it has bathrooms in every room, so Marianna and Rick can’t complain. Plus it has a nice dining room with tables on a vine-covered patio.”            “Okay, I found it,” Norman said. “If we can book this, maybe we can save a third of what we would have paid the other hotel in Siena.”            Kathleen sighed. “Let’s hope they can take us. I must have talked to dozens of hotels. More than you have zeroes in your ledger books.”            “We don’t use accounting books anymore, we use software.”            “Whatever. Everyone’s computer-crazy these days.”            “Just relax while you think, walk if you need to. Do you want anything? I can ring the desk if you’d like a glass of wine.”            “Wine will make me sleepy, and if I’m sleepy I can’t pace, and if I can’t pace I can’t think.”            “Let’s look at Assisi. Maybe we can save money there,” Norman offered.             “No, forget that one,” Kathleen said. “it’s cheaper than dirt. Next.”            “Hotel Villa Cora, Florence.”            “There couldn’t be a more expensive place in all of Italy! Florence is always packed, so this won’t be easy, but maybe we can find something in Settignano, outside the city.”            “Okay. How do we find something good but cheaper near Florence?”            “A million phone calls!” Kathleen sank into the chair. “I’m too tired!”            “You said we needed to do it fast. You’re tired because you feel guilty.”            “Who elected you psychiatrist?”            Norman put his laptop aside, got up from the bed, and came over to her. He put his fingers on her temples and rubbed gently.            “You need a neck rub. You’re all tense in the face, which means your neck is tense.”            Kathleen gave in and let him rub her temples. They had often started out making love this way, with his gentle touch on her head, but that was years before, when Norman had been handsome in his North Dakota way: lean, with a full, well-groomed head of hair. Now she leaned into his fingers, but then suddenly sprang up.             “If we’re going to get more ideas out of my brain tonight, I can’t relax.”            Norman sighed, went back to the bed and picked up his laptop. “Why don’t we look up all the hotels around Firenze tomorrow and get some help to make calls?”            “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how many inns, hotels, and villas there are around Florence?”            “No, but I’m sure Rick and Sandra can help us tomorrow. And maybe we can get one or two others to skip touring and make some calls.”            “Norman, you would make a hopeless travel agent.”            “At least I know how to use a computer.” He said it with his head down, staring into the screen.            “What if you had taken your laptop out and the gypsies had nabbed it? Don’t act like it’s all my fault!”            Her voice rose to a pitch that distressed him with its potential to disturb people even through the walls.             Finally he said, “Honey, let’s sleep and pick it up in the morning. Let the group go out and we’ll work. I have to talk to Jacob about finding a guide.”            Kathleen came over to the bed and got in. Within minutes she was snoring. Norman continued to stare into his laptop, wishing that she had at least thanked him for helping. He knew she felt the responsibility, whatever she said, and didn’t handle criticism well. Rick had been rough on her.              At last he powered down, put away the computer, turned off the light, and lay back. Tomorrow they would begin a life-changing adventure. Forming The Renaissance Club was probably the most daring thing he had ever done, after standing up to the school bully Roger Stark. Rome was out there, and his Renaissance. Wide-eyed in the dark, he wondered if Jacob’s friend could guide them. If he couldn’t, this would be a very short adventure.             He got out of bed and went to the phone, called the desk and got Jacob’s room 
 number, and phoned Jacob. After a few minutes, Norman hung up, put his clothes back on 
 and headed down to the bar. Jacob had news.

New Fringe Magazine interview - Poet Barbara Ellen Sorensen

I'm so pleased to have interviewed Barbara Ellen Sorensen for Fringe. She's a Colorado poet and author of Songs from the Deep Middle Brain (Mainstreet Rag Books, 2010). We have a terrific conversation on the topic of poetry, spirituality, and healing. She's fearless as an interview subject and as a poet, and she also writes essays and poetry on the topic of illness and often set in the beautiful landscape of Colorado and the Rockies.

Also check out a cool interview with Fringe Editor Lizzie Stark on the topic of grownup make-believe, better known as larp, as described in her new book Leaving Mundania: inside the transformative world of live action role-playing games.