One poem you should read right now. Especially if this hasn't been your week.

Dell'interno

aria from Giancarlo Cazetti's L'anima di Marina



Sad, you are sad, say the pitying ones.
I have consulted my wisest friends,
I have brought my troubles to the priest,
I have knelt till my knees are cold.


But in no place does the sorrow part,
this curtain that muffles me from light and warmth.
I stare into green leaves but they do not open for me.
I sit in the sun and the sun stays cold.


It is as if the world itself has said No.
It offers to me only a cold surface, dull
but slick, where I cannot grasp hold.
It tells me this is the bed I have made.


Inland, I long for the sea. It too
is cold, but with time the cold goes warm
and its roar is like a mother's heart
and its No becomes the one I speak.

This is from April Bernard's collection Romanticism. Buy it here. *Or *come on in, it's on the display shelf in poetry.

National Poetry Month, or as I like to call it (cut the crap, stop denying yourself)

Do you dislike poetry? Does the word itself induce high school flashbacks to a time when a bulky clip-art speckled text book told you to find the meaning beneath the meaning? Well then your aversion is understandable. *****************But

I dare you to pick up a book of contemporary poetry. The pageant has evolved. Poetry is sick, twisted, weird, violent, moving, readable....magnetic. Flash fiction? please...

Short attention span? strange tastes? What are you doing not reading poetry? It's like porn and painting and applesauce all in one! If you want something chiller that exists too...*********but

Poetry is there for people who hate grammar, and conventions, or people who love them and want to play with them. If what your brain spits out is to disjointed, or too vitriolic for prose....it becomes consumable as poetry.

Mark has done an amazing job bringing in some of the newest most exciting poets out there. We have the standards too. So.....if you want to expand your reading, challenge your narrative, improve your composing, painting, writing, thinking and living....find a cover or title that speaks to you, read a poem....if you hate it put it down (life's too short-juts pick up another) If you love it you will find a never ending supply of that wealth.

Poetry is not what you read in High School, or for that matter college. It is inappropriate, vivid, uncomfortable ENTERTAINING and alive...and the good stuff is very impolite.

You'll be making your significant other/cat listen as you slur your new favorite poem over 3 glasses of wine and tears...I promise.

Here's what I'm reading now:

April Mowing the Lawn

Drunk and barefoot is surprisingly

Meticulous, especially in the corners,

Shoving the old vrooming machine deep

In the knee-high thrushes of weeds and mint

And flush with the giant slate stone steps

Some glacier dumped a millions years ago.

Up and down, back and forth. Why bother?

I yell to her. Why not simply ask all the horses

Over to take the blades down with their teeth?

Hell, let it grow- Like the golden shadow cast

By our growing pile of beer bottles, like

Who cares? She yells back over the motor that

In South Acworth, a lawn's merely all you

Choose to take away from all that's there

To take away.

from collection Drunk by Noon

(by the kickass Jennifer Knox)

National Poetry Month!

We have an entire shelf dedicated to bad-ass small press poetry...I want it there permanently, but that's not a likely bet (if I were a bettin' woman.) The long and short of it is...Come check out all the crazy-great new stuff Mark brought in while we have all this amazing extra space!!!

How sexy are these covers? How chic? The ultimate spring accessory...but vanity aside...these are some seriously entertaining reads. If you are uncomfortable with poetry...just think of them as edgy flash fiction...genre is a fluidity anyhow...

Next week I'll be writing about my month long speed date with a kindle... it'll be rich.

best assignment ever

My sophomore year in college, (what i can piece together of it)...involved a lot of East African dance, and a lot of reading. My professor Lorna Dee Cervantes (colossal poet activist all around swell lady) assigned a very simple task for her creative writing workshop...to go to a bookstore once a week, preferably an independently owned one...to walk up to the poetry section, and buy one book of poetry a week, based on intuition....don't think- grab one - throw the money down- and go.

I can't tell you how many of my favorite writers I found this way...writing roulette...I think it is important to buy poetry, to read poetry, and to write poetry. Poetry is the easiest thing to read and the easiest thing to write if you can take the time to find kindred writers, and take the time to trust your right to write it down...any of it.

Art should be affordable, accessible...I am drawn to poets who are largely un- experimental with their language and prosody...I am drawn to writers who aren't afraid to speak simply...and meet the reader face to face, and say what it is they are saying...

The reason a lot of people don't bother with poetry is that their formidable experience was one of a fear...a close reading of poems written by affluent white men, birds on fences, metered trochee, iamb, snore...If we could get more working class thinkers into our canon...we would have 7 full cases of poetry spanning our walls...

So my challenge to anyone who has bothered to read this far...Take a chance, and bring home a book (used if you're strapped) of poetry based on anything and everything...including its cover.

a book chooses you, and wow...our poetry section sure is looking foxy.

I believe if a book is brought to your attention, more than 3 times- that the book is choosing you...and you have a moral responsibility to at least pick it up.
(I'm not talking about heavily advertised mass markets, or best sellers. I'm talking about that 7 year old book that you've never heard of, and all of a sudden a friend is raving about it....you trip over it in a used book store, or the author is referenced by another author on Oprah...that sort of thing.)

This philosophy extends to every other area of life...in my alarmingly humble opinion.

So I'm going to start that process- for anyone who may read this.

Dorianne Laux is a poet. She wrote "What We Carry"...the color of my life changed after I read this book.

Gary Lutz is a writer. He wrote "Stories in the Worst Way"...my concept of what flash fiction can do was broken open. I posit,(again in my alarmingly humble opinion), that he has created a new genre.

Kim Addonizio is a poet. She wrote "Tell Me". I see her collection of poetry as an act of permission-giving to anyone who thought "you can't write about that, that's not poetry"....and that sort of thing makes for the most entertaining and accessible art.

Now if you hear of these authors 3 more times, you are bound to buy their work...but I can save you the time...

Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux
Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz
Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio

I know it is cheating, but I'm serious. I'll take that ethical risk.

As another point before I get back to shelving...I chose poets. For those of you who think that you don't like poetry...let me give you this. If you have a short attention span, if you like short stories, or the lace of a novel...If you love stand-up comedy...

Poetry offers more talent and diversity than any other medium...(I'm gonna get slapped for that)

If you don't believe me...check out our poetry section...it is swollen with funny, disturbing, fractured, amorous, academic, experimental, feminist, and humanist poets.

And if you are a poetry lover...buy poetry.

And if you write poetry, buy poetry.

It is affordable...

especially our used poetry.


how poetic.

The Poems I Know By Heart

In Sunday's NYTimes Book Review Jim Holt writes about his endeavors in memorizing poetry, which led me to think about the poems I know by heart.

Two are fairly standard: William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say" and Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening."**

Then there are Robert Herrick's poems. Have you read Robert Herrick? Probably not, or if you have it's his carpe diem classic "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" which you know as "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..." It's ok, but honestly, doesn't do much for me--what I really love is his, um, more, um, randy stuff. The stuff to Julia (and her legs, and breasts, and clothes--especially love the ones about clothes!). The stuff to Sylvia and Anthea and Electra...ah, Electra.

So, here it is, the poem I know by heart (I think I might be revealing a bit too much about myself with this one, but hey, what else are blogs written for anonymous readers for?):

"The Vision to Electra" by Robert Herrick

I dreamed we both were in a bed

Of roses, almost smothered.

The warmth and sweetness had me there

Made lovingly familiar;

But that I heard thy sweet breath say,

Faults done by night will blush by day;

I kissed thee, panting, and I call

Night to the record! that was all.

But, ah! if empty dreams so please,

Love, give me more such nights as these.

Alrighty then! And if you liked that, check out "The Vine." It makes me giggle and blush in equal measure (which is what I love about Herrick--a fine combination of the erotic and the ridiculous). Herrick never married and claimed he was chaste, but I always have this image of him chasing his maid Prue around the butcher block a time or two.

What poems do you know by heart? Who are your favorite poets? I'd love to hear.

** As I was just talking about Matthew MacFadyen (if you are not watching Little Dorrit, do it now! You can watch online!), and could talk about him a bit more, here's his reading of "This is just to say":