Progress and Poetry

Our Random Acts Books project continues to make progress, and we hope to finalize an arrangement with an editor by the end of the month.  We've had more skype sessions and have enjoyed getting to know a few editors as they've read the stories for our first collection, An Ekphrastic Trio.  We all agree we want to add a more engaging title for each of our miniologies, but we still like the Trio theme as a subtitle.  More on the final selection process once we've reached an agreement with our editor!

In the meantime, I read a marvelous piece on the editorial page of the New York Times this morning, titled "Poetry: Who Needs it?" by William Logan.  Wow, the LEAD editorial--well, in the digital edition, anyway--the one with the engraved illustration!  For poetry!  Is there hope for the world, after all?


Logan's piece (you can find it here) posits that "The way we live now is not poetic."  He goes on to note that "...to live continuously in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do."  Hear, hear!

I have to admit I'm always amazed, when I teach a fiction writing class at the Indiana Writers Center, at the majority, if not the totality, of the would be writers who respond to my rather expected question of "What do you read?" that they don't like to read or don't have time to read or haven't read any fiction since high school or even eighth grade.

Of course, with those answers about fiction, I rarely bother to ask what poetry folks read.  I then, of course, go on to urge them to enhance their return on investment in the classes by simply reading, initially in their genre of choice, but then wider, much wider, including the classics and, yes, even that stuff with line breaks and even line endings that have the same or similar sound!

And along those line, I'm reminded of an occasion of celebration of the written word and, especially, poetry, at the Indiana Writers Center's Gathering of Writers a couple years ago.  Allison Joseph, our Keynote Speaker, arrived at our venue, a vast, converted old church sanctuary now used as a historical landmarks center, and was delighted to find how apt her Occasional Poem had proven to be.  Let Allison's words speak:

A Gathering of Writers

Let us dwell in the church

of poetry, of words--our hands

working, tugging, weaving,

struggling with brevity, with breadth,

these words we owe our daily bread,

each syllable as flat and bland

as communion wafers, solid

on our tongues until the wine

comes. Listen as the ancient

organ is fingered with turbulent

skill, choir rising as its brocade

of notes begins, pipes' burnished

harmonies rising to meet

our frail and flailing voices.

May this entire congregation--

young, old, bitter or sane, all

colors, ages, sizes, races--

may this holy gaggle of misfits

and marauders be taken

into the palms of genius, held

there until each one can say

what needs to be said

through dust and kin,

spine and sediment.

And when the graveyard next door

calls for our bones, we can go,

knowing words we wrestled

out of this ebullient unforgiving earth

will outlive us in ways

that can never be buried.

~Allison Joseph

Thanks, Allison.