Okay, it’s an embarrassment of riches, two books coming out within six months of each other. Not to complain, for sure. It is dizzying. I can’t remember which press I’m filling out the long, two-part detailed marketing questionnaire for. I thought I’d done Part 2 of one, but I was remembering the other press. Just got a note saying “Where is it?” so I scrambled yesterday to finish that one. Earlier I sent something back on Google docs without saving it on my drive, then realized I could use some of the information for the other!
If only I could just write poems and essays and someone would whisk them out of my hands, send them to publishers and a team of marketing people! If only I were that famous. If only my personal assistant would hand me a list of appearances all lined up for me, plus plane tickets.
Going public is the part of writing I dread. I am not good at it. “Marketing,” they call it. I think of sitting at a booth at the county fair. Buy my jam. Please.
This is the time I want to tell you Flying Through a Hole in the Storm, my new book of poems, is coming out March 12th (Ohio University Press) And my memoir/essays, Mortality, With Friends, is coming out next fall (Wayne State University Press). I am very pleased with both books. Who wrote them? Writers will know what I mean. You finish the book, you read back through, and you say, “Well, damn, this is good! Who wrote this?” It leaves your hands and hardens into an artifact you’re expected to claim as your own.
Flying Through…. Let’s talk about that one, since it’s coming up sooner. Some of the poems, especially the prose poems, were written under such duress! Frankly, I was depressed. My father was increasingly in need of attention, and then he died, my step-daughter’s cancer had returned, Jerry’s mobility had decreased, my sister’s health problems had increased, I had had two (fairly minor) but painful surgeries. Winters were long and dark. For a while I felt utterly unable to put words on paper. So I told my friend Syd that I’d write something every day and email it to him, not for his comment, but just to hold myself accountable for putting words on paper. Those longer prose poems were literally dragged out of me by their toenails. It was, like, an inspired time.
I read the books of young people—and I do read a lot of them—and greatly admire some of them, but what I’m writing falls more under the category of poems that have “come the whole way.” That’s Merwin. The poem is “Worn Words,” and ends like this:
It is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there.
Here is a “trailer” my brilliant web designer put together for me based on Ohio University’s catalog copy. I don’t know what to do with it exactly except post it here and on other social media. if you have any bright ideas, let me know. Maybe you could post it yourself.