Margo Roby interviewed me at her Wordgathering blog today. We talk about Birds Nobody Loves, vultures, grackles, poetry, self-publishing and writing in general. Check it out.

Thanks, Margo!

The first review of Birds Nobody Loves is up at bhulbhulaiyan:

I was amazed that I would even like pieces about birds- let alone, ones nobody loves. I mean, I could imagine poems about blue birds and peacocks and the like…but grackles?? Number one, what in heaven’s name is a grackle? To my amazement, I enjoyed each piece. By the third read, I was seeing layers in some of the pieces…wise layers…intriguing layers. I knew this was a keeper.

Thanks, Anjuli!

Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine (Broiled Fish & Honeycomb Nanopress, 2011) by Nic Sebastian and edited by Beth Adams has been following me around in my bag and on my phone for several months now. There is a lot of weight in this short collection of 15 poems, and it may not be too much to say I love this book.

Sebastian traces a spiritual path that resonates with me for its recognition of the longing for what is often right in front of us, though unnoticed and forgotten in the action and busyness of life. We wind up seeking something that’s really never very far at all. Sebastian doesn’t attempt to directly define the divine and I like that too. There are more questions than answers here creating an openness and space for the reader to enter and follow along on a shared journey.

In her introduction, Sebastian writes of being sick for silence and stillness which is where I was when I picked the book up last year.

my days are flocks of starlings
wheeling dark waves
of loud chatter

—”my days are flocks of starlings”

A year ago, I found myself “sick for silence” and set out to get back into my habit of walking and writing small stones, a kind of active meditation or prayer, if you will. Those starlings (well, they’d be grackles down here) can get out of hand… loud and noisy nuisance birds, flying in all directions, crapping on everything. With all that going on, it’s easy to forget to be awed by nature, the trees dropping leaves, the birds on their great journeys, even those starlings. To lose this is to close off an important path toward the divine, to stick with the poet’s usage, which I rather like.

home
because my breath ends
in silver plainchant
and woven silence
in you

—”the names of my breath”

There are other journeys too of course, those not marked by miles. The one called parenthood that we’re on now spirals, at this point anyway, deeper into home. My son who has the past week discovered consonants and repeats them endlessly, delightedly, as if singing the most wonderful song seems to me a gift… something so undeserved and precious as to make us wonder how we didn’t know he was missing during the years before he came. He sings his babbling song, we sing back, he responds with laughter and raspberries.

your step is like a small flame
and a song unfurling

—”antiphony in the hills”

Sebastian’s language and imagery—landscapes that evoke the widest vistas and the narrowest paths—are vibrant. This is a book that takes the reader on 15 journeys, each longer and deeper than the relatively brief poems that contain them. The journeys, of course, are one journey leading back to wholeness.

when I have readied myself

I rise whole from the pool at sunrise
and step into you as onto a straight road

—”when you come to me in the dark of night”

Oddly, or maybe not, this book speaks to me most of the end of journeys in which we may have experienced something of what exists behind nature, community, communion, and silence that can’t really be described or explained. It’s not nothing. It’s not imaginary. And in opening ourselves to it, we can find the recognition, warmth, healing and mystery that fill us up with an awe and wonder the way a woodpecker’s rhythm in the trees, a scorpion’s path along the road, the touch of a loved one or a baby’s laughter do.

In this book I’m reminded of the importance of finally coming home. Whatever that might mean to any given reader.

I’m thrilled to announce that my first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is now live.

Here’s where you can go to get a copy:

Paperback edition on Amazon

Paperback edition at my CreateSpace store

Or if you have one of them new-fangled e-reader contraptions, it’s available in both Kindle and EPUB format (it looks startlingly nice on the iPad I borrowed on which to test it):

Kindle edition at Amazon

EPUB edition (for iPad, iPhone and most other readers) at Lulu

It’s also available in the iBookstore.

These birds will continue to fly around the internet and automatically take up roost in many other online booksellers over the next few weeks.

I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy. Thanks also to all of you who’ve read and commented on these poems as they’ve appeared on this blog and in various other venues over the past three years.

I saw this video Beth Adams posted at Cassandra Pages a month or so ago and keep coming back to it as I start off on another River of Stones challenge. I began 2011 the same way and resolved to maintain the daily practice for a full year, at least. I made it to August 23 and then… school started, I ran out of ways to say the drought was slowly killing my state, it was too hot and the air too full of smoke and ash to want to go outside. Other things to do, and then, the world just went right on. It started raining (not enough, but it did) the weather cooled, I started sleeping again and then the year was at its end.

For the previous two years I’ve picked some favorite stones and made them into a chapbook to give away, but there wasn’t one for 2011. I just didn’t have time, couldn’t make the time (but mark did and he said his lovely Postmarks chap was partially inspired by my gnarled oaks) and then… I don’t know, I just wound up feeling like I’d let go of something important that I hadn’t meant to let slip and that was the practice of seeing, paying attention, and then recording my observations. I don’t know if it makes me a better writer to do this, I suppose it does, but I do think it makes me a better, or perhaps, more thoughtful person. As I’ve done before here, I paraphrase Pirsig in Motorcycle Maintenance: you are the cycle you’re working on. Writing stones isn’t about the writing, it’s about growing by connecting with a world spinning so fast as to seem out of control.

We have bags of clothes our six-month-old has outgrown. When we went to buy him some new clothes, we were shocked by how small all the three-month-old clothes were. Was he ever really that small? Where did the time go and how on earth did it disappear so quickly. It was only just July.

So, marking time, reflecting on it and slowing it and me down enough to really reside for a few moments in its stream… those are good reasons to start afresh observing and writing stones. As the video above reminds us each year is a collection of days, each kind of the same but passing quickly, sometimes too fast for the eye to take much of it beyond the larger picture. Thus the beauty, the importance, of small stones and the kind of awareness they engender when we set out to really pay attention.

Thanks, Fiona and Kaspa, for the river. I’m eager to dive back in.

I post my stones at my other blog, a gnarled oak. Please stop by and hopefully I’ll make it beyond August 23 this time out.

I’m honored to have two poems, “Winter Solstice” and “In the Time of the Automobile” (both from my upcoming collection Birds Nobody Loves–More to come stay tuned) in the inaugural issue of Curio Poetry alongside the work of several other fine poets. Thanks to editors Joseph Harker and Tessa Racht for starting this journal and including some of my work. Now, go check it out.

I’ve been carrying mark Stratton’s Tender Mercies (The Pancake Truck Press, 2011) around in my bag for a few months. Mainly it was so I wouldn’t forget to write something about it, but it’s taken me this long. The old blog has fallen down the priority list somewhat these days, but periodically I get the book out, read a few random poems and then stick it back in my bag. Now it’s started to feel like a friend tagging along from place to place offering snapshots and images from dreams and nightmares. It’s a friend who doesn’t explain himself but the conversation is good and usually interesting.

The Cowboy rides
through lead guitar dynamics
a single stream of time
signature changes

–from “Tender Mercy #28D”

That’s the sense I get from Tender Mercies, a collection that began as a series mark posted to his blog about a year ago or so. Sense is a funny thing too, because it doesn’t always make sense to me. I don’t always get what mark’s getting at, but the ride, the language, is a pleasure, and sometimes a line or two finds a place in my mind, takes root and won’t leave me alone. So the book goes back in the bag and I carry it around some more, sometimes forgetting it’s there only to be happily surprised again.

I misplaced my words

I kept them in the lee
Of a tow sail

They went well with
Collard greens
Or a glass of milk.

–from “Tender Mercy #17b”

Earlier this year, mark asked me for feedback on the manuscript and a blurb. I offered those, but I kind of wish I’d had the year to do it. Maybe the blurb would have been better, at any rate. I say that simply because after nearly a year of hanging out with these poems at hospitals, the dentist’s offices, school, who knows where else one finds a few moments to read, I just like them more and more the better I get to know them. I still see a lot of poems about connection and disconnection, love and loss, though, but they get funnier or sharper or wiser with time and rereading. Sometimes more mysterious too. I think good poetry should be like that.

Toxic rains fall not
from only the heavens.
Domestic gods and
Dusting share the blame.

–from “Tender Mercy #14″

In addition to Tender Mercies, mark has just released a limited edition chapbook called Postmarks. There’s also an interesting interview with mark at Jessie Carty’s blog. mark blogs at AGGASPLETCH.

This is somewhat overdue and includes poems I found in September and October. Follow the links and enjoy the work of these fine blogging poets…

“Coyote Crossing” by Chris Clarke. A moving meditation on the cycle of life and death from a roadkilled coyote pup to the golden eagles that bear him away… “He would have been a god here; he lay broken, compromised, / dissolving in the desert heat, insensible, inert.”

“Un Secret Served on a Porcelain Platter with a Fish Head” by PJS. I love the title and those “Wasted girls with gunslinger hips”

“The moon, the sea and the aspen tree” by Sharon Brogan. Lovely lyrical poetry… I can read just the title over and over again… from one of the first blogging poets I ever found.

“Drought-ridden” by Laurie Kolp. A fellow Texan writes about this unending drought… “my mind’s a dervish fit of fear”

“Haiku Headaches” by Juliet Wilson aka Crafty Green Poet. Great haiku with fascinating process notes.

“One foot in front of the other” by Deb Scott… “Some secrets are like a cavity / filled with precious metals”

“Greater Love” by Dick Jones. Powerful meditation on religion’s darker use.

“What’s right in front of me” by Carolee Sherwood…
“three pumpkins flicker and grin on your window sill,/ heads the children cut from their own necks”

“Chivalry” by Joseph Harker. Violence and the beauty of sure movement. Be sure to check out Joseph’s new chapbook Greeks Bearing Gifts.

“you can’t tell direction here” by Dana Guthrie Martin. The poem has been removed as has another I’d planned to link to. Here’s why. Congrats and good luck, Dana.

moonlight sparkles in
grey hair and
bourbon ice

beneath pine trees she
severe counts satellites
on silent skyways

falling stars
fading shine

the sky’s last synaptic glow
strange and waning

the highway fell
silent last summer
no cars since then

her mind wanders
revisiting the cellar
each jug of potable water

she calculates
consumption, her husband’s
weight beside her

bourbon ice (luxury
for special nights like these)
grey hair
moon-sparkling knife

the broken highway
heat lightning
bones in moonlight

–

Another poem about water, or rather, the lack thereof.

Links to some poems by web-based writers whose work I’ve enjoyed lately. I hope you’ll follow the links and enjoy these poems as well.

“Cloudlonely” by Susan S. Keiser. This one just sounds so good. One to reread and savor.

“Morning” at Jumping Into Life (Not sure who the writer is). A perfectly captured moment watching birds and baby (much like my summer has been).

“Time’s Reflection” by Jean Morris. A lovely photo poem. The words and image could stand alone but together… wow.

“In Victimhood” by Horace Jeffery Hodges. A clever parody of “Invictus” and a reminder for me to get that flu shot.

“795 (Concrete)” by Angie Werren. A stunning “phoem” (as she calls them) appearing in her beautifully redesigned feathers micropoetry site. A good reminder to leave the RSS reader once in a while.

“Being” by Neil Reid. This one had me at the first lines: “there is a gate, we call it sky / when visible, we call it cloud”.

“If there were such things as ghosts” by Dave Bonta with a whole comment thread of very cool ghost poems by Dave’s readers.

“Mail Pouch” by Hannah Stephenson. I’m always amazed by the quality of Hannah Stephenson’s work considering she manages to write and post a poem every day. I had several I wanted to pick, but this was a favorite for the opening image of the barn and the faded letters. What is it about faded ads on old buildings anyway?

“from seeds here & in my backyard” by Carolee Sherwood. Wisdom gleaned from watching nature’s processes.

“The Bone House” by Wrensong. A moment by the sea: “the salt-scented blossoms of kelp / the song of whales and old wars.”

“Night Predator” by Sherry Chandler in The Cortland Review Issue 52.

“Indiana” by Dale Patterson in Right Hand Pointing Issue 43, Part1. Read the whole thing.