ten mile creek almanac chapbook has publisher

ten mile creek almanac, my chapbook, has a publisher.

Proving that sooner or later the right bus comes along, Finishing Line Press accepted my manuscript. Exclamation point.  That was on April 25.

By May 7, the ramifications of this excellent development were clearer. Lots of moving parts to publishing even a small book, parts for the publisher, parts for the writer. For the writer to consider: art work for the cover? black and white? vertical image/horizontal image? permission for use of the image? short bio for back cover? longer bio for the inside? endorsement blurbs or blurb? who will write the blurb? who has written one already? acknowledgments of the magazines that published poems in the chapbook, have you left any out? thank you to? and a myriad more questions plus  worry--lots of worrying over undetected stupid writing errors; all leading to the big worry, who will buy this chapbook? Who indeed will purchase a small chapbook written by an unknown writer? And in these latter days of publishing, a press can only publish what the writer can sell. 

Not to be a whiner or even to seem like a whiner, who knew beforehand that things are not like in the movies--how can I still be so impossibly naive? How, never to have stopped to wonder anything at all about how a book gets to be how it looks?  How never to have thought much except to have a general feeling of I like it/I don't like it.  How, to be surprised to discover, yet again, that every action has a full range of consequences. For instance, well before, when I did not even dream of a book but only hoped that one other person might read something without yawning, was my goal, in those dark ages, the owner of Cover to Cover bookstore, here in SF, said, Let me know now when you have a book, I'll have a reading here.  And I thought, a book? is she crazy? but instead I said, isn't that nice of you! Then she went out of business. I remember that offer of  hers now. Then, ten years after that book store closed, and I growing closer to being able to get  my mind around the idea of a book of mine--forget the book!--two more bookstore owners, one by one, said, Remember now, let me know and we'll have a reading here!  Now they're out of business too.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

My daughter says, Mom, you know lots of people, go through your address book, remember anyone at all and alert them.  And I'm thinking now, really thinking, and I see even more clearly how hard it will be to find readers, those elusive readers who even acknowledge poetry as a living, a breathing activity.  In my walking-around experience, I know of only two such people, count them, two, who do not flinch when they hear that I write poems, two who read poetry, two who actually hunt it out and read it. Others say they like poetry and I guess they do, but they don't read it, seek it out, find it a necessary part of their lives. That's ok, but it's that hard pit we find at the core of a real apple. Every part of the deal is hard, the writing of it, the getting it right, the sending it out, the rejections, the waiting around, the not losing heart, the stubborn optimism, then the acceptance, the hooray! and then the publishing with its ever present moving parts. That's the all of it.

All of which brings me to a favorite rant, the rant of mine that places much of the blame for people "hating" poetry on English teachers and I claim my right to say this as a former English teacher. It is also a fact that I have had many folks who upon hearing I write poems say to me, God, I hate poetry. It's kind of kick in the gut to hear this said aloud but they say this with real despair/gut feeling/animus.   It is the rare student--the rare student who's had the even rarer teacher who demonstrated, who helped that student see that poetry is everywhere, that poetry belongs to everyone. No, most teachers beat poetry to death, pull it out by its roots, shoot it dead. Read Billy Collin's poem, Introduction to Poetry, "all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it." 

Granted, in this poem Mr. Collins is talking about his students. I correct him to say that the true source of all the torturing is a some funky, wrong-headed teacher, possibly an errant parent. They're the ones who brought on this animus. It's as if the kid, hungry as a bear, were to sit down to dinner and the dad or mom plunked a hunk of raw beef, a couple of whole onions, chili peppers, a bag of uncooked beans, plus a blunt kitchen knife, on the table saying,  "This will do it!"-- What is the rhyme scheme, does it even rhyme? No! O God. How many feet in each line--feet--what? trochee? spondee?--Look, look there's an enjambement! --No, no. Save the mechanics of it for some other time. Don't do that to a poem: Poetry fills a need each of us has. The trick is finding the poem(s) that describes your need, that fires up an image in your mind, shows you what you had not seen but which is there.  The right words are everyone's right and heritage, not to be messed about with, too sad to be denied.

All this to say, selling a book of poems is a small mountain to climb but a worthy one--after all we've been writing poems, reading poems, seeking poems, since we came down out of the trees--maybe poetry was the reason we found our way down out of the trees. That first human who found the right words in the right order to express the right thing was the true Eve the true Adam, glorious.

time, our resource

It's already the end of the second month of 2018, and what I'm going to write in this entry today I wrote several years ago. It's old hat, I know, but it's still something I want to say before I forget.

A friend and I were talking about writing a will, getting long term care health insurance, living in old age near a good medical center, living in old age near family that cares: in other words, we were discussing all the sensible strategies that people take, if they can, as they are confronted by their old age.  --This is us.--

As we went on and on about what to do, it came to me that we do these things so that we may cheat our inevitable end.  Well, cheat it, for a while. If we do such and such, we'll be better prepared, we say. I truly believe that in some very basic, secret, part of our hearts we think we might get out of this intact. We know this isn't so. We have evidence everywhere that as Brendan Gill said, "it ends badly for us all." But we also know that responsible people should look to their old age and make sensible decisions for themselves, hiding away from the fact that the sensible preparations are easier than thinking about what will really happen to us afterward, after we can't live.

We fill up our time with activities that will distract us from the coming calamity. And that's good. We're allowed, as they say.  But, what we are really seeking is endless youth, the exuberance of youth when we had no future beyond a month or a year or two, when who knew what might happen. We long for our youth when we had time enough. We thought. Time. And, now we see how finite time is and we fill up our time. We fill  up our time and we lose time. We forget the gift that time is--time our only resource. We overlook the beauty that is everywhere. How gorgeous a smile is. How incomparable a kind gesture. The completeness of an iris that does not need us, only the sun and dirt and water. And, paradoxically, or maybe comically, we only manage now and then to think of the gift and are brought round again to our mortality and the realization that we must leave all this beauty behind!

Still, the ancients tell us that wisdom comes with age and that we are meant to grow wiser as we grow in age. Wisdom as a compensation?  I'm not sure I think I know how we attain this wisdom. Does it come on its own, naturally? Do we not do anything and it comes to us? Or does it come to us and we must be seeking its arrival and be ready to greet it, ready to recognize its presence? And what would this wisdom be like? Is it acceptance of our fate? Is it good humor? Is it living more and more in the minute and less and less and less for things and false gods? Is it grace that we seek when we reach for wisdom? the grace to be like the trees and the birds and animals who have not been gifted, we believe, with speech and an intelligence like ours, but who instead live completely and unalterably in the minute? Whose joy appears to be unalloyed?

What to make of all of this? Every bit of us, and every thing in the universe, are bits of stars, living and dying, and dead stars. Is this what we must accept and luxuriate in, this underlying oneness? Is this wisdom? (And, how to cope with our stupidity when we cannot see this oneness in ourselves or in others?) It comes to me that perhaps we are unable to accept completely because of a failure of imagination: Being cannot comprehend non-being. We can't imagine it. If everything around you is, how can you imagine the interstitial space, the blank space, the nothingness that non-being is.  I think this is the fear that paralyzes us and makes us petty and foolish, fearful and less than ourselves. This is the fear that overwhelms us and can make us sick.

Rabindranath Tagore says in one of his poems that we must "embrace death as we embrace life." Is this the wisdom that we seek? How does that work?