My poetry book is out

"Unglobed Fruit" is now available from lulu.com. Go here.
I've been a bit slow getting this posted, but there is a 15% discount through March 15 if you use the code IDES305. It will be available on amazon around May 1.

The book has received one review that I know of so far, from Toni Clark on Goodreads:

Poetry archive: Googlepoems and Puffin Circus

Googlepoems is a fledgling zine of "formal and informal verse about, derived from, or inspired by the great search" - i.e. internet searches. My poem Could I have a word is currently at the top (November 25, 2010). Enjoy the info on the sidebar!

Puffin Circus is another fledgling zine which has been publishing small monthly issues since August. (I have a fondness for puffins and a memory of seeing them ride the air currents down a cove on Runde, a bird island off the west coast of Norway, their orange feet tucked up behind.) Well, Puffin Circus was asking for winter poems for the December issue and I sent them two, "Vanguard" and "Snow and Ice." They're here, on page 5.

Organizing a book of poems

I'd been circling around the problem of organizing a manuscript for several years. My poems are all over the map, both thematically and formally. I tried several ways of grouping them by themes – political, humorous, nature/mystical, experimental, but nothing would work.

One day I realized that I had published 72 poems in sundry magazines, and it came to me to arrange those poems alphabetically by title and see what happened. What came out was a nice random mix. Subsequently I took out some poems that I didn't like all that much, and added some favorites that I've had trouble getting published – figuring that I might as well stop submitting them and just put them out there.

I decided on "Unglobed fruit" as a title poem, and that it should come last. I switched it around with "Unjubilee" and cut out everything in the alphabet after U. In the August issue of The Centrifugal Eye I found a lovely stitchery by Patricia Wallace Jones that seemed to echo several themes in the title poem. Pat was delighted for me to use it as a cover image.

At my advanced age I can't go gallivanting about the country giving readings, as any publisher would want, so I'll be self-publishing the book with Lulu. Editors of four of the zines I've published in have kindly written blurbs – which, much to my surprise, all fit on the back cover. At this writing I'm waiting for the formatted text. More later.

Belated discovery of publication in Poets Against War

I just discovered that Poets Against War published a parody of the national anthem I wrote in 2002 without ever telling me. I submitted it sometime in 2003 and it seemed to fall into a black hole. Turns out it was published on July 25, 2004. At the time I'd never had a poem accepted by a literary magazine.

The New National Anthem

My Poetry Archive: The Ghazal Page

The Persian-style ghazal consists of a series of thematically unconnected couplets (shers) with lines of equal length, unified by a refrain (radif) at the end of the second line of each sher (in the first, at the end of both lines). The radif is preceded by a monorhyme (qafia). Traditionally the writer's name occurs somewhere in the final sher.

I first became aware of the ghazal form in the wake of 9/11. On that day my son George, an ethnomusicologist specializing in Persianate cultures, opened at random his volume of the medieval Persian poet Hafez. Hafez is regarded as an oracle in the Persian-speaking world, much the same way Virgil was in medieval Europe. And George landed on a ghazal which spoke to him so powerfully that he made a rough English translation. The refrain (radif) was Do not be consumed by grief. I put it in the winter 2001 issue of Types & Shadows, the Journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts, of which I was then editor.

The foremost advocate and practitioner of the Persian-style ghazal in English was the late Agha Shalid Ali (1949-2001), who was dismayed by the prevailing fashion for defining a ghazal as a series of disjointed couplets with neither radif nor qafia. I have his own book of Persian-style ghazals in English, Call me Ishmael Tonight, as well as a collection he compiled of Persian-style ghazals by American poets, Ravishing Disunities. They are both delightful and inspiring, the moreso since so many of them depart from the traditional subjects of romantic love and mysticism; some are playful unto hilarity.

When I tried my first ghazal, I found it to be such a congenial form that I wrote several more. The disjointed couplets provide a great way to use the bits and pieces which inhabit my mind, and the monorhyme spurs odd connections. As for putting my name in the final sher, I have a triple advantage: I can use Esther, green leaf, or mirror.

Having written four that I felt were presentable, I cast about for a place to submit them for publication, and found The Ghazal Page. Gene Doty, a retired professor of Engish based in Missouri, goes by the editorial nom de web of Gino Peregrini. On his site he explores the ins and outs of ghazals in styles both Persian and Arabic.

I sent him my four ghazals, which he published in the October 2007 issue: Progress, Chocolate guzzle, Agenda, and Threnody. He added an editorial comment (below the last one) that floored me.

The following year Gino presented us with a series of challenges, i.e. everyone was to write a ghazal on the given radif. I participated in two of those: Clouds and Rain and Sugar .

Gino is also interested in exploring the possibilities of the ghazal form for variants, hybrids, and the like. The tercet challenge asked us to find a way of writing 3-line shers. I tried expanding the monorhyme into what I called a Welsh ghazal. Another hybrid, which was published in this year's April Fool issue, was Haibun: Failed ghazal with interruptions

The ghazal continues to be a form I turn to for inspiration, for instance when I'm stuck during National Poetry Writing month.

My poetry archive: Folly

The short-lived ezine Folly specialized in parody and satire. I daresay old hands know the identity of "C. Sharpe," the editor; I do not. Parody lovers will be grateful to Rose Kelleher for preserving it on her "Rambling Rose" site. The five issues boast contributions from a number of masters of light verse, and provide a wonderful diversion; they also bear the stamp of the Bush years.

(For those who write metrical poetry, Rose also maintains an annotated list of Venues for Formal Poetry on her site, listing print and web magazines that are either exclusively devoted to, or noticeably friendly toward, poetry written in forms.)

Back to Folly: The final issue, for October 2006, included two of parodies of mine which I believe marked my online debut in a literary zine. Both have backstories.

Little plastic hangers from new pairs of socks is the third in a series of poems on that subject. The first was a collage of quotations from various prose and poetic sources; the title is the first line, from one of Don Aslett's decluttering books. The result was startlingly apocalyptic, so much so that I challenged myself to do another collage in a more meditative vein. After that, I decided that I should really generate a poem using my own words. The poem in Folly is the result.

(Little plastic hangers #1 is in the current issue of Pemmican. It won't be archived, so read it while you can. If I find a publisher for #2 I'll post the whole series.)

My last duke was the culmination of a game played on poets.org. The participants took turns suggesting an object for each player to write a poem about. When we got up to 25 objects, we challenged ourselves to write poems using all 25. This is mine.

My poetry archive: IPBC - Fall day in the park

In August 2007, another poem received an honorable mention on IPBC. Of this poem I remember that, after a string of rather dour poems, it came to me in Quaker meeting that I should make this one a poem of celebration. Writing it felt like a victory.

Fall day in the park

In the lapidary light
of the sea, I am a flatfish
prostrate on the floor
of a cathedral, the eyes
on my back attuned
to the coruscation
of corals, polyps, bryozoa
swaying in the current’s sunlit blue.

Now on dancing eddies
I levitate in celebration,
vault and sweep and skew,
pitch and bank and camber
a hymn to overarching glory.
Then I sink again, canting
like a falling leaf, and rest

in the mud, where one day soon
my center eye will contemplate
the bare ruined reef while the other,
the wandering one, keeps watch
for the green ghosts hovering
amid the welter of weeds.