As the e-book has come barreling down the publishing highway, poets have been left mostly in the dust. Why haven’t poetry e-books emerged on Kindles, Nooks, et al? Several forces are at work, the small size of poetry book publishers being one factor, but perhaps the most troublesome is being the pesky technical problem of not being able to control line breaks in e-book formats. A thought-provoking article about it appeared a year ago or…
Have you ever stumbled on a vein of mineral wealth in your work, a place that has been compressing inside until you open up the seam and it bulges with images and sounds? I’ve rarely written series poems based on emotional content, though certainly like all poets, my work proceeds in tonal phases. But recently I found an image so striking that it opened up such a seam and I could only work it through…
I spent some hours yesterday writing an artistic biography of my father, who was a painter. I found myself writing that I learned about art standing near his easel and watching him paint. It was the silent choreography of creativity. He would stand back, leaning forward, hip thrust out, as he considered his next move, like a chess player. Then he’d move decisively forward, closing in on the canvas, brush scumbling furiously in a small…
I’m very happy that my poem “Kingdom” appearing in the current issue of the fascinating zine Goblin Fruit. They publish poetry “of the fantastical, poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way.” Fun to be part of this imaginative venture! Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.
Election Madness has seized us again, with the first of the debates between candidates for president. Do we really think any one person in any one office can make a very big difference in our lives? The entire system of our democracy, with its checks and balances, is designed to prevent it. True, there has been an alarming power grab at the top in the last few decades. It created deep divisions in our country.…
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I reviewed it on Goodreads, which made me laugh. Date finished reading: Never. One to five stars: 10,000. Bookshelf: my iPhone, so I’m never without a Dickinson poem, should the need arise. I’m tempted to only quote Dickinson in a review of this luminary of solitude, this pristine custodian of her own periodic deaths, and this mystically crowned priestess of Nature’s God. When my inspiration flags, a Dickinson poem…
Sharing this poem which will appear in my forthcoming collection Gods of Water and Air. I’m not entirely sure from which publisher it will be forthcoming, as I’ve had some publishing mishaps you can read about earlier in this blog. But it will forthcome. Here’s a poem that originally appeared in Pilgrimage: Anvil of Light In a forgotten valley studded with runic oaks, at mid-August, on an anvil of light my breath and…
Since hearing that Kitsune Books, the publisher of Gods of Water and Air, my third poetry collection, was ending business operations on December 31, I’ve researched small press publishing to try and understand what had happened and what to do. I had picked Kitsune partly because they were a rare combination, a press publishing both poetry and prose, and I have a novel to publish. What I’ve found shocked me, even though I had a…
I’ve made it conclusive: my poetry collection, once to be published by the now-closing Kitsune Books, is now available. I can’t go with a two-month publication life for my book, which is the only possibility with Kitsune, as they are closing on December 31 and my book was to come out November 5. It’s a funny feeling, starting over, with a fully finished book — complete with blurbs and cover art. The process of sharing…
My experience with Kitsune Books has left me thinking a lot about the state of poetry publishing and the poetry community — its coherences and divisions, its fragility, and its lack of a viable economic structure. A spider is building a web on the other side of the table outside where I write this. I don’t like spiders, but I have no heart for destroying his morning’s diligent work, the kind of work I do…