I’ve returned to working on my novel about Italy. Took a wonderful webinar from The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, and it was so full of great tips for editing your novel, that I was itching to open the last draft. Their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, really is a must-have. It’s on my Kindle. And the BEST PART: if you buy a copy, The Book Doctors will…
Gerald Stern won the Robert Frost Medal — the top prize of the Poetry Society of America, awarded for for “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.” Here’s Stern reading his lovely, joyous poem Bolero. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.
Digging back into the old memoir, Rocket Lessons (forthcoming from who-knows-where, who-knows-when) to rehab some of the chapters as short essays to submit here and there, I discovered one about my father’s biggest project, the launch of the world’s first telecommunications satellite, Relay I. As it turned out, it was by five months the world’s second telecommunications satellite, but as my father always liked to point out, “It’s still up there and Telstar died in…
Gods of Water and Air Lynn Domina, a poet with three published collections (so she should understand the value of a book review), undertakes a blogging goal that leaves me breathless: reviewing a poetry book every week. Since I can barely make it through reading a book a week, I’m in awe. Not only her productivity, but her eloquence and insight are impressive. These aren’t fluff reviews; they’re the real deal. Lynn’s reviews offer analysis…
Aldrich Press has created a beautiful new trailer for my book! It’s my reading of “Flight,” the first poem in my book. It’s on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KaXVkL8cac&feature=youtu.be I looked at an interesting array of poetry book trailers, and was most taken with Sandra Beasley’s single poem videos, so I decided on a single poem reading. It was fun to make, finding images and music from royalty-free sources. If I were trying to decide whether to buy…
A rain dance poem from Gods of Water and Air. Rain can be like Chopin, all piano strings and syncopated pauses, geometryof blings under wheels and rubber heels.Sudden baptism from branches.Drooled harmonies. On your neck, wetstrings slithering like kisses. Ringsaround drops that plop into pools: ting,ting, ting, ting. Scriabin zitheringloss up your edges, a musical soul-cling, that cold feathering. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.
I received a great literary Christmas gift among many this year. This one was an offer to include in my daily writing practice an idea suggested by someone else, a launching pass (appropriate for a rocket kid). So today, having a minor stomach bug and needing to rest, I decided to try one and challenge a friend to join me. This is the prompt for December 26: You can see everything in the universe in…
Why do I think so much of my late father, our family Grinch, at this season? Because I always suspected his way of loving the holiday, as a Jew who celebrated it to please his family, was to grumble his way into the whole joyously chaotic event. This poems, from my first book, Earth Lessons, celebrates the frictions that ultimately became a gift. CHRISTMAS WEEK IN SAN FELIPE Up my nose, between my teeth, tiny…
At first I didn’t want to make one. Then I did. Then I really didn’t, once I started putting together a script for a video that was to be no more than two minutes long (plus or minus), and trying to figure out what kinds of images, and whether still or moving, and what the voiceover should be. I wrote a bad script, pulling pieces of poems into a narrative whole. It stank. Then I…
I’m only a few days late but still in time to celebrate the birthday of one of the main characters of my novel and play (both in the works): Gianlorenzo Bernini, the genius of the Baroque, the tempestuous sculptor who they say shaped the face of Rome and who sculpted one of the most talked-about (even today) sculptures of a saint ever made. Bernini’s passionately gorgeous art transformed sculpture and created the style they now…