Less is Less Unless it is More Good News

THE LESS AND LESS PART
Last week I visited the Utrecht Art store, near where I work, and discovered their big redesign of all their retail outlets meant they dumbed down their offerings. Gone was the large cutting table where I could layout boards and decide how to frame my art. Gone were the useful array of books on art and technique (now down to one woefully inadequate kiosk with a dozen fairly useless titles and not even one book on calligraphy) and the general air of being a place that mattered was gone. I had remembered an energetic knowledgeable staff, dynamic manager, shelves with many good choices of tools, papers, and paints...and discount tables. It is now a sort of E-Z artsy store, akin to the art section in the Micheal's Craft stores. The place was like the cat that had gone to be "fixed" and came back with depleted interests... clearly the digital world is affecting viability of art stores. Will they mostly go the way of bookstores leaving behind just a few small specialty shops catering to real artists?

Lately I've had a "Potemkin Shelf" feeling at the big Barnes and Noble (Broadway and 82nd Street). As if the books being turned face out were the last in line. There's a subtle thinning of the stock...just what Borders went through in its final months. It makes me sad. Bookstores have been a mecca for my cover design eye and a feast for my insatiable reading heart. And big mega stores just means more walking and looking and browsing—a place where I pleasantly split into two selves in one, my body relaxes into a slowly strolling trance and my mind and eye are darting and diving—reuniting at the end of the checkout line. Luckily I still live in a college neighborhood where print books will last as long as there are students and professors to read or assign them. Also, I thank the graces for the New York Public Library....

THE GOOD NEWS PART
Yesterday I ran over to Book Culture and bought a used paperback copy of William Carlos Williams book long poem Patterson. I am writing a book of poems about a small urban park—sharing space with my photos. I'm looking for inspiration, other ways of seeing. This tip came from Paul Pines, "one of the best collections of cityscape poetry is by my old friend and mentor Paul Blackburn in a book called The Cities, published by Evergreen. I recommend it highly. And in all of his work Paul had an eye for detail and ear for sounds and speech that was peerless and informs his work. He was a protege of Williams, whose classic book Patterson is another great one (both alluding to Lorca in some way, his Poet in New York). That book by Paul contains his great good-bye to W.C., "Phone Call to Rutherford," that great moment when Williams, unable to speak because of his heart attack, says, "...you have made a record on my heart."" I had looked at passages from Patterson back in college but what a different rich cornucopia it is to me now! Thank you for the leads.

So this brings me to my news, my book, Pocket Park, will be coming out Fall of 2013 from Marsh Hawk Press!!!!!!! I have 4 months to take the rough manuscript and finish, rewrite, reimagine, and find where I can add or subtract. What are the best city park poems you have read? Let me know, I'm stoking my imagination for the work and play ahead.

Shakespeare and Neruda and William Carlos Williams, oh my

One of the great things about having daughters in college is they get excited about their reading and performing and I get to vicariously fall in love with poets again. Caitlin is enraptured with William Carlos Williams. She is taking a book history and binding class and plans to put shorter WCW poems into the pages she is building. She is at that stage of quoting a few lines and practically swooning, "Tufts of purple grass spot the / green meadow and clouds the sky" she says, "I could eat those words." Not to mention the plums.

I have directed her to Neruda (Twenty Love Poems & a Song of Despair) and the visual treats of William Blake.

Natalie is performing a gruesome scene from one of Shakespeare's bloodiest romances, Cymbeline, for her acting 3 class. As princess Imogene she awakens next to a headless corpse she believes is her husband, the appropriately named Posthumus. Lots of shock and weeping, and smearing of gore. Delicious amounts of rage. She did a summer intensive at Shakespeare & Company when she was 18. Since then she has had classes that have added more depth to her understanding of the language and context. Not to mention becoming 21. How I wish I could see her perform. I hear the excitement in her voice.

And I am rereading the wonderful poetry of Bill Matthews. God he could write. He made the meditations of a drunk man pissing off the back of a boat into poetry. His language has that immediacy of surprise. The sure heft of original observation. So good to rediscover and find it still is as good as I remembered.

When I was 18 I was crazy about Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel poems. I still am.