Potpourri
On things I'm reading, listening to, & thinking about, not that dried up stuff that smells weird...
BOOKS I’ve enjoyed reading (or listening to) lately:
Poetry:
Sara Moore Wagner’s Lady Wing Shot (Lynx House Press, 2024) (review forthcoming) - an ambitious collection that not only gives us the life of Annie Oakley, but commentary on women and guns in America.
Jane Wong’s How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (YesYes Books, 2023). I admired this work about family, heritage and legacy and will continue to learn from the structure of these poems, many written in prose blocks with dashes or long connected sections. (I tend to write short poems, so I love to learn from poets who write long or dense poems that keep my attention.)
Fiction:
Dennis LeHane’s Small Mercies (Classic LeHane - tough talking characters in situations that they can’t completely control.)
Jennifer Wiener’s Mrs. Everything - At first, I thought this was trying to be a “Stefan” book - “This book has everything — racism, religion, gender identity, hippie counterculture, drugs, rape, infidelity, molestation, the women’s movement, the fitness revolution, cancer”— but the sixty year span of the book kept my attention and the characters did seem real.
Non-Fiction
(*Not technically done with this one yet, but really enjoying it so far*)
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me by Bernie Taupin. The music of John/Taupin was the soundtrack of my pre-teen/teen years, and this book gives a backstage pass to the start of that collaboration and its rise to fame.
MUSIC
New music from The Decemberists is always cause for me to rejoice. But a 19 minute opus called “Joan in the Garden” with a middle section of exploratory feedback and noodling that leads to a rocking ending? Yes, please. (And it’s one of those Meloy lyrics where I pull out all the lush and unusual vocabulary as a prompt - I already have one poem from the word bank I created.) A few years ago, I got to ask a question at a Q and A before a show, and I asked Colin Meloy if there was a folklore or character that he hadn’t written about yet that he wanted to explore. He answered that he had some Joan of Arc songs…I wonder if these two sections were a part of those. Hmmm…)
I have also had the new (newer) album from The Vaccines on repeat. Straightforward rock and roll —my favorite cut is “Discount De Kooning (Last One Standing).” Great driving music, too.
Tomorrow I will be leaving for a short writing retreat with a good friend. We are staying on a farm with goats (goats!) in Maine. I am hoping to spend some time with the goats and hiking the farm’s beautiful woods. I want to continue the drafting I’ve been doing. I also want to spend part of the time looking at the new work I’ve created in the past six months—I’ve been so focused on trying to place my three completed manuscripts (YIKES) that I haven’t really stopped to look at the scope of the newer poems to see what I seem to be obsessed with lately.
PROMPT for this week:
Here is a list of some of the words from “Joan in the Garden” that are not a part of most people’s everyday lexicon:
Orrery augury dowry hosanna cleave temptors tinsel
firmament breadline reckoning flayed parquet mariner
wayward imperium androgyne dauphin
Use at least three words from this list to write about something ordinary, like driving to work or cooking a meal. This “elevated” diction may take you to new places of comparison or reference.