Remembering Cynthia Harper

Let me start with this when talking about Cynthia J. Harper: Cynthia was my friend. And with this: Cynthia was a fine poet. For more than ten years, we met almost every Wednesday for lunch and for talk about poetry and poets and almost anything else we could think of. We started our lunches at La Foccacia on the corner of South Alamo Street and St. Mary’s and then, when that Italian grill banned smoking, continued on the patio of the Blue Start Brewery. Every Wednesday, that is, except when it was too cold (rare in San Antonio) or rainy (also rare) or if one of us just had to be somewhere on Wednesday.

I first met Cynthia almost twenty years ago in San Angelo, Texas, where we were both reading at the Fort Concho Museum Press annual summer literary festival. I had just started editing Pecan Grove Press and Cynthia’s first shared book had been released by Plain View Press in Austin, Texas. The book was called How Many Moons and featured work by Cynthia, Elaine O’Brien, Mary Esther Frederick, Pamela Rutherford and Hazel Ward. When Cynthia read “Chickens,” a poem that is probably her most popular, I knew I wanted to do a book by her for Pecan Grove and included it in her first full length book, Snow in South Texas. The poem has very serious things to say but says them with wry humor:

Chickens

Grandma said chicken was the answer,
especially if you could do the biscuits too,
but for some reason it just didn't stick.
Mama said dip it in egg yellow and fry it hot.
Your mother said watch out for hot spices, no surprises.

Fifteen hundred chickens,
think of the enormity of that.
Can you see them lying in a
huge pile waiting to be fried?

If only someone had shown them to me
the day I married you,
but there they are,
three chickens per week,
twelve chickens per month,
one hundred and forty-four per year,
allowing a certain margin of error,
fifteen hundred plucked, gutless chickens
waiting for me with flour, paprika,
all that grease;
they outlived two electric skillets
and wore a groove in a cast iron pan.

and you

just ate them one by one
over all those years with
hills of mashed potatoes until
you met a woman who's father
owned a Colonel Sanders
and you took to take out.

Cynthia visited my graduate poetry classes frequently over the years and was always a great hit though I think she got mad from time to time that I always requested the chicken poem. She was very pleased, though, that the Poetry Society of America selected the poem and made a poster of it to place in the Houston buses as a part of its Poetry in Motion program.

The Poetry Society also selected another of Cynthia’s poems (forthcoming in her posthumous Pecan Grove book, New and Selected Poems of Cynthia J. Harper) to place in the buses in Austin, Texas. That poem, “Hanging the Wash,” was also a great favorite with my students:

Hanging the Wash

Mama said you could always tell
the state of a woman’s love life
by the condition of her underwear.

Twenty ivory briefs
flapping in the wind,
not a lavender, pink,
or naughty black
in the whole sensible lot.
Four beige half slips like
neutral guards in a row.
No touch of scarlet or
little pink rosettes,
just clean drawers hanging
on a gray metal clothes line.

Oh, Mama, how did you ever learn so much?

Humor, serious stuff: a quality blend. When the Poetry Society of America selected poems from the buses to appear in a print anthology called Poetry in Motion, they selected “Hanging the Wash” for inclusion.

Here’s another of my favorites and another that my students loved. It’s from her Pudding House Publications chapbook, Crossing Borders:

Lipstick

On my mother’s fifty-fifth
birthday she said, I’m
over the speed limit.
I don’t need to be polite
to another snotty salesgirl
as long as I live.

The Estee Lauder
woman dripping rouge
her arms covered
in cheap gold bracelets
was the first hapless
victim. No dear, she
said looking down her
long pointed nose,
that just isn’t you.

Mother plopped
her purse down,
looked right in
the old gal’s
eyes and replied,
I’ll make that
decision, dearie.
I’ll be wearing
it not you.

When one of
her friends asked
what shade it was
she simply said,
"Liberation Red."

Cynthia was a fine poet and a good friend. She was a librarian in the New Orleans and San Antonio federal judicial libraries and taught English as an adjunct professor at Palo Alto College, at the university of the Incarnate Word, at Northwest Vista and UTSA, but always looked back most fondly to her students at St. Mary’s University where I work and direct Pecan Grove Press.

We are going to miss her.

--Palmer

TACWT, Phillip Lopate, Writers' Meetings

One of the advantages of having one of the MFA in creative writing programs host the meetings of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers [TACWT] from time to time is that they can generally provide a guest speaker who is worth hearing. Most interesting, I thought, was the somewhat drunken effort made by Ken Kesey more years ago than I like to think when Texas State University's creative writing program managed to get him to speak at the conference.

This year, Phillip Lopate was busy meeting with students at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and opened the conference with readings from a variety of his books: fiction, essays and, yes, poetry. Lopate readily confesses that he is a much better essayist than he is either a poet or story writer. He is also a much more engaging reader of his nonfiction than of his other genres...perhaps because he knows the essays are so strong.

After his presentation, during the Q and A, I asked if he had ever considered compiling an anthology to be called The Art of Creative Nonfiction? He seemed to get a kick out of the question and said that he had nothing against the people who wrote creative nonfiction but that he preferred the term “personal essay.” He could not conceive of Montaigne ever using such an infelicitous phrase as "creative nonfiction" for his personal essays.

I did make the mistake over drinks of criticizing Houston, Texas, and that's one of the cities Lopate seems to be particularly fond of...perhaps because, when he was younger, he taught at the University of Houston with Barthelme and Cynthia McDonald and a host of other very fine writers. Or perhaps because we always look back at such times of intense camaraderie spent with other people who share our interests...from a very friendly perspective. Or perhaps because Houston really is the great city he remembers and I am stuck on remembering my own, less glorious, days and nights when I used to hitchhike or, later, ride my much-too-small Suzuki motorcycle there to visit and hang out with friends. Select any of the above. My own experience with people who have lived there or visited is that one is either a Houston person or...not. While there is some wiggle room in between, as my friend James Cervantes asserts, I do not think there is very much.

I was particularly impressed with Lopate's reading from Notes on Sontag. I bought a copy of the book, which I had not read before, and have been reading it intently since Friday night. If you have a chance, do acquire a copy and read it. It's from Princeton University Press’s “Writers on Writers” project and is more a series of skillfully woven together essays than one continuous book-length essay. Lopate knows that his own particular gift, like Sontag's, is more for the not-too-short essay, perhaps 25 - 50 pages, than for the full book. It is an incredibly well-reasoned examination of Sontag in a self-reflective manner. As Lopate discusses Sontag, he also discusses his own ideas about literature and about being a "public intellectual."

The essay ranges from his experiences in college where Sontag was a demanding and glamorous young professor, to shared experiences with the new, mostly European, cinema and war protests. Always, the focus is on Sontag, but always Lopate and his own sensibility hovers above. And it is that implicit conversation between Sontags work and Lopates mind that makes the book interesting. This is, yes, literary criticism. And it is a discussion of theory. But it is much more than that, Notes on Sontag is one of those rare books in which two writers we can admire come together to talk about their art. Sontag is, of course, not present in the present of the book. Her books, from Against Interpretation to her later works, speak for Sontag while Lopate has the advantage of being present in the present of his book.

There is a sly wit to Lopate’s writing that is immensely appealing and that speaks to me because we went through some of the same experiences. He writes a bit about the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era: "She went over to [Dr.] Spock and introduced herself, and pretty soon she and the other star demonstrators, including Grace Paley and Dave Dellinger of the War Resister’s League, were cordoned off so that they could be arrested together and peaceably ushered into the waiting paddy wagons, while the rest of us were consigned to march in a circle, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” slogans, not even worth getting arrested"(42-43).
That sort of thing played itself out in demonstration after demonstration in the late sixties.

This is not meant to be a review of all of Notes on Sontag, merely a nod of thanks to Lopate for having written the book. And to Princeton University Press for its “Writers on Writers” series of books. It is enjoyable to read about writers in a way that is not strictly critical or biographical but that relies on fine writing and a sense of conversation that readers can imagine they are overhearing. Notes on Sontag does that. The reader overhears Phillip Lopate talking about an acquaintance he once knew—one who impressed him when he was a young man and one whom he was, finally, able to assess not only critically but also personally.

There is also a long tradition of this kind of writing and analysis. It goes at least as far back as Aristotle's writing about Sophocles in The Poetics and to Ben Jonson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing about Shakespeare. And, in this country, to Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James on Hawthorne.

I do not go to writers’ workshops—-those festivals held all over the country in the late spring and summer. But I do go to meetings with other writers and find those usually engaging and worthwhile. I’ll be at AWP in the spring and will make other TACWT meetings. Why? To meet with friends who share my interest in writing and to listen to the occasional person of letters who interests me. On a personal level, that’s a good thing to do.

Thanks for reading this.

Professors / Poets / Police

I can almost understand (almost, but not quite) why the Cambridge police might arrest a man (regardless of color) who they suspect is breaking into a home. I said “almost.” Profiling happens. And profiling is more likely to happen in a ritzy, mostly white neighborhood than in a poor to middle class neighborhood. So, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, distinguished Harvard University professor, demands the respect he deserves and a police officer demands the kind of deference the police have come to demand and the result? Dr. Gates is cuffed and carted off to jail. Dr. Gates evidently assumed the police were public servants.

What is less understandable is why two distinguished university poets and professors, both of whom have brown skin, one a Mexican national teaching at Ohio Wesleyan, the other an Indian professor of poetry teaching at Central Connecticut State University, are arrested for no discernible reason…except maybe for being members of minority groups.

Ravi Shankar, founder of the on-line literary magazine Drunken Boat (http://www.drunkenboat.com), was stopped by police in Manhattan. The story, according to the Hartford Courant, is that Shankar, after attending a release party for his magazine at a Chelsea gallery, was driving to his home in Connecticut when he was stopped by police for no apparent reason. They cuffed him and took him to jail charging him with crimes committed by a young white male. Shankar tells his own story in the article. You can read a copy of the article reprinted in the Austin, Texas newspaper at http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/2009/08/04/0804shankar_edit.html But Ravi Shankar’s arrest was on the first in a brief period of four weeks.

Pecan Grove Press poet and author of Rio Vertebral/Vertebral River, Juan Armando Rojas, according to reports, has a gun held by an Ohio Wesleyan police officer in his face and was cuffed and taken to university police headquarters for the crime of working late in his office. Juan Armando Rojas writes to his translator, Jennifer Rathbun, that “Last night, at midnight, I was working in my office, UN 201 [Juan Armando Rojas] like I have been doing many nights for the past five years (many professors at OWU do). I was working, among other academic issues, on my self report, when I perceived the door knob of my office moving, I also heard a dog bark and a few seconds later I heard voices. Would you like to know my first reaction? I was, of course scared, also confused, and immediately I said "give me a second, I'll be there". When I opened the door, thinking that it was probably the janitor, maybe a security officer, maybe even Helmut or Conrad (both of them love/ed working late at night as well at UN) and for my surprise the first thing I saw was the gun of a police officer pointing directly at my face. (Five police officers, one gun twelve inches away, I'm "Ordered" to go to the floor and I get handcuffed).” Rojas was later identified and released. The ostensible reason: there had been a burglary in the building that night.

But, we are left with a rather overwhelming question. Would what happened to Dr. Henry Louis Gates and the two professor/poets have happened had they been white in those areas? Two award-winning poets and one extremely well-known Harvard professor are arrested on bad charges, handcuffed and taken to jail. Would that have happened to white, male or female professors? Getting into their homes after a door had jammed? Driving home sober from a celebration? Working late grading student essays? I seriously doubt it.

Racial profiling is more than just an abstract matter of the police (university, state or municipality) looking for “likely suspects” based on color. It is a deeply humiliating experience for the victims. Dr. Rojas writes: “The wound they did in my person, intellect, soul and spirit: its really hurting. “What they don´t know is that they have awakened a poetic voice of [denunciation] that for [a] long time I had been awaiting.” And Professor Shankar after being held for three days awaiting charges: “The gavel dropped, the bailiff barked and I retreated in a daze. Arrested on Friday, I'd been just another minority suspect, an easy catch in the night's sport. Arraigned on Sunday, I was now a professor, presumably wealthy enough to hire a lawyer.”

I don’t know what action here is warranted, but I do urge the readers of this blog to work to keep profiling from happening, to speak out when incidents like those involving Drs. Gates and Rojas and Professor Shankar and, yes, the less visible people who are arrested every day for “driving while black” or being “brown in the wrong neighborhood” have such injustices happen to them.

See also: Robin Kemp’s blog entry: “OUTRAGEOUS: Police abuse of poet-professors of color
http://robinkemp.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/outrageous-police-abuse-of-poet-professors-of-color/

Poetry and Information Are NOT free

Why Poetry and Other Books Cost So Much

The first book I published that used a distributor was a rather small prose chapbook. I did a print run of 500 copies and thought maybe if it caught on I could do another 500 or (wild dreams, wild dreams!!!) it might warrant a run of more than a thousand copies. The small book cost right at $2.50/copy to print and perfect bind, so I thought I’d manage to get a small profit by doubling the price: $5/copy sounded reasonable to me. I mean I thought people could reasonably be expected to be willing to pay $5 for a copy of a very good book that, after all the frontis materials, measured out to about 50 pages with 40 pages of text.

In the past, I had published mostly local poetry books and didn’t even bother listing with BIP or trying to sell to any but a local, very kind to local authors, independent bookstore called The Twig. The Twig is still in business, is still a fine little independent bookstore, and remains very kind to local writers. If you’re in San Antonio I recommend strongly that you support a bookstore that supports writers. That would be The Twig on Broadway in the ritzy little town of Alamo Heights. Selling locally, as Pecan Grove Press did in those early years, meant we could charge a modest amount above cost of printing and binding and earn enough to publish the next book. That’s all we wanted to do. And that’s all we did for our first twenty or so books. Our mission then was to introduce new San Antonio writers and give them a chance to get started. We did that very well.

Expansion

And then we expanded our mission. We moved out into the whole State of Texas and then to the country as a whole. Sounds like an expansive business plan, no? But no one working on the press has ever gotten paid. The poets have received pretty much what they could get from selling copies of their own books after receiving a 40% discount. We remain a very small press: two employees of St. Mary’s University donating time to publish collections of poems by people we consider to be very good poets. Most of these poets publish their first books with the press; others come to the press because they prefer doing books with small presses like ours.

Okay. So, we expanded our mission (not our operation) and that expansion required that we acquire a distributor since bookstores in other towns could not be expected to be as open to our press as was The Twig. That first book we published? We took the cost of production and added 30%. That was our existing formula for local poets. And our new distributor, acquired after we had already printed and bound the book, charged what to novices like us was an astounding 65% discount for the privilege of shopping our books to bookstores. 65%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That meant we LOST money on very book we sold. Not only that, the bookstores that purchased books through the jobber (we were the ones who got jobbed!) demanded and got the right to return any unsold copies of the books without paying anything for them.

Returns, Sales, Consignments

So, the reason books cost so much? Distributors and bookstores. Recently, we had an experience with a bookstore in New Orleans that wanted to buy directly from us. A number of small bookstores do that and, believe me, we appreciate it. We told the bookstore manager that we offered a 30% discount on orders directly to bookstores and that after the first ten copies, the store could return up to fifty percent of books purchased. The key work there is PURCHASED. Bookstores, essentially, think they are buying books from publishers but, in reality, they are not. They are (if they insist on the right to return any unsold copies) actually taking them on “consignment.”

If you are a dairy farmer and sell milk to a grocery store. Do you give them the right to return unsold bottles of milk? Of course not. The store “bought” the milk; you did not place it in their store on consignment: “Hey, if you sell this, then give me 45% of what you sell it for, okay?” No dairy farmer could stay in business for long with a system like that. And yet publishers are asked to do that on EVERY sale to a bookstore or distributor. Our only recourse? Jack up the cost of books. So, the reader buys a book at four times what it costs us to publish it instead of a reasonable amount above cost.


Right?

The right to return? There is NO such right. That so-called “right” is why you have to pay so much for books. That “right” relieves bookstore managers of the responsibility of actually managing. We had one bookstore manager get incensed over our returns policy. “I only ever sell 3 -5 copies of these books and need to return unsold copies,” he said. He was ordering 30 copies. Why does a bookstore manager order so many more copies than he knows he will be able to sell and then return the bulk of his order? Because we publishers let it happen. Dairy farmers don’t let that happen. They’re too smart. It is high time publishers started saying NO to distributors and to bookstores. NO. If you BUY 20 copies…then they’re yours. Forever!

Amazon.com is as bad as any distributor or as bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders. Not only do they charge a large discount for books from publishers, they also charge us to list the books in the first place!!!! In effect, we pay Amazon a certain amount of money each month or quarter to screw us. Why do we do it? If you’re reading this, you’re probably a writer, no? How do you feel when friends tell you your book isn’t on Amazon.com? Do you explain the economics to them or say, “Well, I wish it were there, but my publisher won’t do it.” Yep. It’s the publisher’s fault alright.

This Blog Entry

This blog entry is a plea for sanity in the book trades. I am also a librarian and I have seen the price of books and journals (a similar market) climb steadily at a more than 9% rate per year for the last 30. Check the Bowker Annual for the exact rates and you’ll find journal prices are much worse than even book prices and the two together are worse than the average yearly increases in the health care industry. This is improving a bit for libraries with the advent of digital journals and books, but not for the purchasers of books and magazines.

Information, my friends, is not free. Not even information on the Internet. But it is vastly more expensive because of the predatory practices of distributors and some bookstore owners.

Thanks for listening to this rant.

The Intersection of Poetry and Other Arts

I have been fairly remiss in my blogging lately and tremendously admire those who maintain intelligent and still timely blogs. I thought I would do something a little bit different this time and post a journal entry / poem based on my recent trip to New York. What’s this got to do with poetry and publishing? Just a minute, please. You see, my wife and I went to Lincoln Center to listen to the European Chamber Orchestra perform pieces by Mozart and Haydn with a short piece of experimental music by Karlheinz Shockhausen inserted in the middle. I was struck by Shockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte and began thinking about how, back in the 1950s the various arts seemed to inform each other.

What Robert Rauschenberg was doing in collage, John Ashbery was doing with language. And who can forget Frank O’Hara’s “I am not a painter”? I don’t see that kind of synergy amongst the arts anymore. Music, painting, sculpture, poetry, theater—all seem to be going their own separate ways. So, I thought about Shockhausen and wrote this journal of a day in New York:
August 16, 2009:


At Lincoln Center

I.

We went one night to the Alice Tully Hall in the Starr Theater
of Lincoln Center, had coffee and wine at "At 65"
sat under the triangle of a concrete overhang
that perfectly matched the raking of the building
people in suits and ties an elegant woman wearing
an ao dai—traditional costume of the women of Vietnam—
I complimented her, said “Beautiful Ao Dai”

Kontra-Punkte
            
1.
 
NO
            are even birds singing
    what can birds sing    time  time   time
 
                        a lone dove
warbling song birds
            NO       some thing   some sound
     armadillos scrape dead leaves
AH!                 sand blows across still active streams
            nothing whistles back
    something     nothing      sand slithers down living dunes
 
 
she complained about the late summer 
coolness     wondered what I meant by those two words       
New York NY     I still love the city, but as a tourist      
someone who returns from time to time    who
needs a quick fix        and who laments the cleanliness     
while simultaneously realizing  that those who live on the island   
those who live there those who    
 
2.  
 
BEEP! 
            sounds of the cleaned up city
     tour buses circle the park
vultures prey upon the already dead
 
                        an old man shuffles by massed banks
wonders why nothing changes anymore
     (new]   AH!            listen   Sony trumpets in Times Square
[Spapers) blow in the wind    speared
by sharp ordered spikes     orders of cleanliness
 
 
You see, we took a tour bus    Gray Line       I had never 
done that         had always avoided    such things    
And the elegant elderly woman         
who narrated the bus ride       a performer of no
mean skill       kept talking about this and that    
about how much the condos cost and about how much 
the old burned out and now restored tenements cost     me?
 
I wondered how long any poor people at all would be able to live 
in Manhattan.  Not too many more decades, I suspect.  
 
3.
 
            do not grow old
rest     sleep on park benches    park plan circles
     Schist outcroppings           a woman talks
 
$50 “B” not “m” illion          what it’s worth
            today’s    dollars    the land   —that’s where
     Jackie lived     –where Lennon died   SEE!
 
the guard stand     IMAGINE!       doormen dying    security
            television        monitors   dying breeds
 
 
We stayed in one of the old hotels in the theater district:  
the Edison.   One step up from the Milsaps Plaza 
where I stayed when AWP was in Manhattan.    I continue to resist, 
for whatever reason the shiny towers of the homophobic Hyatt people 
and the Mormon Marriots and the people who have turned the dirty, 
lovely old city into Manhattanville—a slick northeasterly kind of Disney World.  
 
 
4.
 
Stop!      don’t move   Harlem/haarlem    tenement  bought
            for $15K   1970   my cousin      sold $1million   yesterday
     burn it    toast it    profit/loss   someone moves out
 
others move in     65th street revival   barnes
            & noble           so clean   nature abhors
     cleanliness             I thought I saw   AIEEEE!!!!!!!!!
 
Michael Jackson sings               Apollo       Cotton Club !!!
 
Antiseptic?  Manhattan is not quite that, not yet.  And yet so different 
from what it was when I was young and loved the dirt and grime 
that I lived with in what some people would
call abject poverty but that was, to me, only young and romantic.
 
5.
 
BEEP!     so many people       clean     wearing cameras
            digital billboards   closed to traffic   the Palace
     I dreamed I saw     soot falling
 
guggenheim    city      met      so many      pollock
            rothko             AIEE!  rauschenberg     miró
     where are the alleys    where the oil cans radiating warmth
 

II.
Anyway, I had meant to talk about the concert and the clean 
well-lighted place that is  the Alice Tully Hall.  I was, to start with, 
wearing one of those Velcro-made-it-possible removable casts 
because I have a very tiny stress fracture in my right foot.  
I hobbled into “At 65: and sat with a sharp Verplunkt! 
on one of the cushioned benches.  Susan fetched the drinks.  
It was out 36th anniversary night and we were celebrating 
with Haydn and Mozart and a German experimental
tonal composer named Karlheinz Stockhausen.  
 
6.
 
i found a cat   abandoned       shaking           saw crazy walt
            looking for a quick bj             taken away
     the old wagon shrieking                down city streets
 
a young man looks for a whore    spitzer chased them away
     used them               AH!     Dump the whole thing
 
Ah, Stockhausen.  No one liked the Stockhause—sharp contrast 
to the Haydn and the Mozart.  Haydn and Mozart were 
friends in real life, celebrated each other.  Stockhausen came 
more than a hundred years later, ensconced in post-WWII Germany, 
studied with `Messaien, loved Pierre Boulez
and Varese, tried to find new ways of making music 
to match what was happening in the other arts:  abstract music, 
pointillist sound textures.  
 
7.
 
            noise               so much           noise
     no longer here    hustlers selling whatever
 
frank o’hara     AIE!     sings in the subway    ATMs    concrete
        young men in gray suits     drop dollar bills

The program was:  Haydn, Symphony No. 45 in F-Sharp Major (“Farewell”), 
1772, followed by Stockhausen, Kontra-Punkte, No. 1 (1952-1953), 
and then the Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 17 in  G Major, K.4523 (1784).  
Haydn and Mozart belong together and Stockhausen?  Stockhausen was inserted 
because of the nature of Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony.  
In that symphony, in the final movement, Haydn performs a musical trick(!).  
Toward the end, the audience sees a violinist stand up 
and move off stage, followed by another and another, until finally 
all of the musicians except the  first and second violins have left the stage.  
They end the symphony with a superb duet.  
 
8.
 
no longer here                        so much     A!   pedicabs circle
 
young men and women       clean       hustle for a buck
     two hawks nest on a condo ledge        it is too late
 
Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte does something similar, but without the trickery.  
Performed with only ten instruments:  including a bass saxophone, 
flute, cello, violins and piano.  The ten instruments play off
each other.  At the beginning, the instruments are harmonious, but that
harmony moves to individual instruments making sharp, very brief statements.
Finally, each of the instruments, slowly, but surely, withdraws from the 
conversation:  a violin, a cello, the sax, the flute…until only the piano is left 
playing a solo.  
 
9.
 
     an old man    shuffles along 5th avenue
            falls     at the corner of Chase     and Bergdorf
 
 
A little like the Haydn, no?  Except there is a thematic musical 
reason for the withdrawal.  No one in the audience laughs delightfully as they see 
players stand and leave the stage…no one leaves…only the sounds withdraw,
leaving a kind of solipsistic solo behind.  And yet the solo is consonant with what 
has gone before…alone but with the same themes. This, Stockhausen seems to say 
is what contemporary life and art is about.

10.
            winds blow through    glass canyons

—Palmer

Judging a chapbook contest

It has been a long time since Pecan Grove Press ran a chapbook competition and we may not do it again. The problem is not that the entrants were awful or that we received too many of the so-called "workshop poems;" the opposite was true. Of the more than 100 entries we received, a very large percentage was written by better than competent poets. Thus, reading the manuscripts that came in took much, much longer than I had been prepared for.

And, yes, I read them myself. The reason for that is that running a small press is, like relationships, a very personal thing. Well, I almost created a very sexist metaphor there but managed to stop myself. But an editor lives with a manuscript for a certain length of time, selects its book cover and its font and its size and the quality of its paper. If someone else, even a poet whose work I love, selects someone I'm supposed to publish and selects a manuscript I, personally, do not like--for whatever reason--then I am not a publisher/editor but a clerk/typist. So (getting back to the first sentence in this paragraph), I read the MSs myself and, yes, a few are so bad that I don't make it all the way through, But (see the first paragraph) many are truly very, very good.

I am wondering why that surprises me and suppose it is because of all the bitching I hear about "workshop poems." I have, over the past five weeks, read more than 100 collections of 24 - 42 pages (more than 3,000 pages of poetry) and have enjoyed most of the poems on those pages. I will grant you that many of the pages ran together into a kind of "uber-page), but most of them I would be happy to live with for a few months.

Oh, the answer to one question I sometimes get: How do you avoid slanting your judgment towards a personal friend? If a friend enters the competition, that friend's work goes in a separate stack of MSs. After I have read the others, I read those. If I think a friend's MS deserves the prize, I place it with all the finalists and ask one or more of my local poet friends to read the finalists (my friend's MS among them) and select the MS they consider best. If they select my friend's, then that's fine. If they do not, my friend's MS comes out of the stack of finalists.

When I had narrowed the current stack of MSs to twenty and then to ten, I had real problems: quality collections and more quality collections. At that point a judge begins dealing with gradations of excellence and that causes headaches. I read the same MSs over and over and decided to go with the ones that I continued to enjoy after numerous readings. I'm sure that I will publish more than one of those final manuscripts. The plan is not to use the entry fees to publish anything other than manuscripts that were entered in the competition. More about that in the next paragraph.

Okay. Why have a competition at all? Why not just put out a call for small book manuscripts? Aren't you just taking poets' money to publish collections that should be published even if there were no competition? The basic answer to that last question is YES, they deserve publication without the poet's having to pay contest fees. And, I would love to publish small, integrated collections without having a competition, but if I did, the press would go broke. Not enough people will purchase what we call "chapbooks." That's why almost all contests say they will publish from 150 - 250 copies of the winning book. The WINNING book--the one we send to all entrants. Ideally, at least for presses like mine, the contest fees cover the costs of publication and small prize fee to the winner. Presses should not use competitions to make money, just for publication costs.

My thanks to everyone who did enter. Your entry fee is going ONLY to cover the cost of publishing chapbooks that were submitted to the contest.

Pecan Grove Press is pleased to announce the release of a new Chuck Taylor book

Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon is the latest collection of poems by noted Texas poet Chuck Taylor.

Some comments from other noted poets:

“Chuck Taylor’s Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon presents a fusion of eastern and western sensibilities in a series of image-filled meditations, some long, some short, on a life rich with a variety of experiences. Two characters dominate—Vincent, the impressionistic visionary, and Li-Po himself, who is reinvented as Vincent’s mirror or foil. Nature is infused with light and human relationships are shot through with darkness in these bold, exploratory poems.”
—Janet McCann, author of Emily’s Dress

“Chuck Taylor brazenly borrows the clear, wise, and consistently wry voice of the ancient poet Li-Po to speak of life, love, and fatherhood in the 21st Century. Using the synonymous name and voice of another character, Vincent, Taylor brings the reader the angst of guilt and regret of a failed relationship with a daughter poignantly reminiscent, in tone to W. D. Snodgrass’s iconic, Hearts Needle. The honesty that embodies these poems touching the many aspects of one man’s reflections on the many mistakes and successes that a fully lived life always brings will resonate with any reader. This book, like the “box of jewels” in the ending verse of his poem, Li-Po’s, appears to hold, “copies of every poem / he floated / all those years /down river.”
—Dave Parsons, author of Editing Sky, and Color of Mourning

Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon is available from the Pecan Grove Press website which will enable you to order directly or through PayPal and is also available on Amazon.com.