The Best Poems of 2009

Anonymous ….. “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “We Shall Overcome”
Benjamin Franklin ….. from “Poor Richard’s Almanack”
Gintaras Grajauskas ….. “World in Your Pocket”
Kaylin Haught ….. “God Says Yes to Me”
Lee Hays and Pete Seeger ….. “If I Had a Hammer”
Marc Elihu Hofstadter ….. “Black Angel”
Emma Lazarus ….. “The New Colossus”
Percy Montross ….. “Clementine”
Geoffrey G. O’Brien ….. “Old War Injury”
Plato ….. “Socrates to His Lover”

plus haiku by Keiho

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

Coincidence

A few days ago I’m reading before bed like usual. I read some pages from a book, then I put it down and pick up another, go a few pages further into that one. In Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, his essays on current poetry, I come across a discussion of the way the Australian poet John Tranter has mined “Dover Beach” to create some poems of his own. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” ends thus:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

So I put aside Close Calls with Nonsense and pick up Gregory Benford’s science fiction novel Timescape. The characters hear noises out in the garage so go to investigate. They surprise some thieves and one of our heroes brandishes a fireplace poker.

Markham swung the poker back and forth in front of him. The men seemed paralyzed by the sound of it. In the gloom they could not tell how close it came. Markham could not judge the distance either. Ignorant armies clash by night, he thought giddily.

So, hey, that was fun, going from one book to another and encountering the same line of poetry in two different contexts.

Then I remembered that a few days previous I had read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in its entirety in an anthology edited by Robert Bly, News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness, a book I’m still working my way through.

update:
There’s one more item. I’ve been reading another anthology, The Cento: a collection of collage poems, edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford. As Welford explains, “A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources – often … from great poets of the past.” I came across the placemark last night (2/5/12). I’d put it in a couple days after the Close Calls/Timescape incident. Maybe I was prepared by that, making it seemed natural when in a contribution by David Lehman I came across this:

… To begin the morning right,
The small rain down can rain

Where ignorant armies clash by night
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Glenn Ingersoll reading from a Roger story, plus some Fact poems

Louis Cuneo has uploaded to youtube selections from the Touch of the Poet series, which took place in the basement of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. This is me reading from a notebook. The video announces itself as documenting a 1997 reading then seems to change its mind and say it's 1998. I can't remember myself, but I may be able to get the correct date from a diary. Not that it matters so much. The chapbook I read from at the end is one Kent put together on the computer at home.

The Best Poems of 2010

Steven J. Bernstein ….. “Murdered in the Middle of the Dance”
Walid Bitar ….. “A Moral Climate”
Sargon Boulus ….. “How Middle-Eastern Singing Was Born”
John Cage ….. from “Themes and Variations”
Heidi E. Cooper ….. “untitled”
Najwari Darwish ….. “Clouds”
Michael Davidson ….. “Thinking the Alps”
Lucille Lang Day ….. “In Praise of Jellyfish” and “Near Kibbutz Nir David”
Andrew Demcak ….. “Postcard”
Dmitry Golynko-Volfson ….. “Passing the Church of the French Consulate”
Ko Un ….. from “Flowers of a Moment”
Alexander Kushner ….. “Memoirs”
Ann Lauterbach ….. “Clamor”
Rachida Madani ….. from “Tales of a Severed Head”
Thylias Moss ….. “The Lynching”
Rea Nikonova ….. “312 steps …”
Michael Palmer ….. “Voice and Address”
Po Chu I ….. “Sleeplessness”
Vasko Popa ….. “The Starry Snail” from “Heaven’s Ring”
Samih Al-Qasim ….. from “An Inquest”
Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez ….. “Sing Sing Sits Up the River”
Sohrab Sepehri ….. “At the Hamlet of Golestaneh”
John Oliver Simon ….. “Caminos” and “El Canto” and “Endecasilabos” and “Jade”
Patricia Smith ….. “Annie Pearl Smith Discovers Moonlight”
Jeet Thayil ….. “Spiritus Mundi”
Alexandr Ulanov ….. “Untitled”
Keith Waldrop ….. “Wandering Curves”
Wang Shih Ch’eng ….. “The Red-Petaled Plum”
Marjorie Welish ….. “Skin”
Adam Zagajewski ….. “At Daybreak”

plus haiku by Buson, Seibi

In the links below I talked about how my “best poems” lists come about, so if you’ve Googled yourself or some other obscure poet and come here all unknowing, but really want to know, do a little link diving.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

pile of reading

Timescape by Gregory Benford
This science fiction novel was published in 1980. I remember reading a review of it, probably in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I don’t remember the review being an all out rave, but it was positive enough for me to pick Timescape off the shelf at the paperback book exchange in Sebastopol when I had credit to use. The book then sat in a box in the closet for years. I brought it to Berkeley when I cleared out my mother’s house. It’s okay. I’m about halfway through. Characters living in 1998 are trying to send messages via tachyons to characters living in 1963, hoping the folks in ’63 will manage to head off some of the fomenting ecological disasters of the late ‘90s. I read another SF novel recently that was set in a year that came and went. Benford doesn’t fill his 1998 with spaceships the way Frederic Brown did.

If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
A collection of essays, the ones I’ve read so far recounting memories of a sissy boy childhood and awakening gay sexual feelings. “First” describes a car ride in which the five-year-old Ryan proposes to his five-year-old beloved, Ben. That’s what people in love do, they get married, right?

Close Calls with Nonsense: reading new poetry essays by Stephen Burt
Twenty years ago I swore off reading critical essays because I was reading all these critical essays in order to find out what I should be reading but rarely actually reading the works the essays were written about. That’s what you do when you’re an intellectual, read thinkers writing about art. Right? No more reading about fiction or poetry, I sternly directed myself. You must devote your reading time to the poetry or fiction that these critical thinkers are thinking critically about. It was a good choice. I gave myself permission very recently to read essays again. Since I’ve been reading without the help of the judgments of others I have developed judgments of my own so when I read a critic, Stephen Burt in this case, I have confidence in my own opinions and have some perspective on the critic’s take. I’ve read a few of the contemporary poets Burt talks about here – D.A. Powell, August Kleinzahler, Rae Armantrout – but mostly not – Liz Waldner, Laura Kasischke, H.L. Hix. I don’t know what I’ll take away from this book, exactly. On the whole I think it better I go back to reading poetry to the exclusion of people talking about poetry. It only matters so much what others think. If Burt loves somebody I care not for, so what?

Paradiso Diaspora poems by John Yau
John Yau is a favorite. I just read a selected by him. Liking this one less, the writing seems slacker, but there are lots of fun lines. “[T]hose of us perched in the back rows, and there are far more of us than there are seats, can’t tell which entrance in the hours erected by the sky’s solid façade might prove useful should the mounting chatter take a turn for the worse …”

The Wounded Alphabet: poems collected and new, 1953-1983 by George Hitchcock
Both Yau and Hitchcock ply surrealistic bayous. Yau is playful and shifts from serious to goofy over the course of a poem (or a line). Hitchcock doesn’t do fun. He’s all serious, often in that melodramatic tone I associate with 19th century verse. “[S]omewhere in the years outside these walls / A boy, shivering, dives in a golden river // Still searching for a bit of porcelain, / White, in the shape of a fish.”

The Cento: a collection of collage poems edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford
The poems I crafted from titles owned by the UC Berkeley library would fit well in here.

News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness chosen and introduced by Robert Bly
A Sierra Club publication that wants to be more ambitious that just being a collection of nature poems. I understand there’s a new edition available, but I’m reading the old one which was given to me by my first landlady in Berkeley.

Drama: an actor’s education by John Lithgow
This memoir can be fun, can be a bit much. “In the towns, the streets are eerily empty. The carousel in Oak Bluffs is shuttered and silent. As the days pass, all signs of human life disappear from the windswept beaches, leaving them desolate and melancholy.” The streets can’t just be empty, they have to be “eerily empty.” The beaches without humans on them are necessarily “melancholy”? Drama, indeed.

From Hell a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
I was going to read this someday. When I saw that the West Branch copy had been misshelved at Central I decided I would be doing the library a favor by checking it out so that when it came back it could be directed to the owning location. Alan Moore is interesting. I don’t always love his stuff. In fact, I often find it a tad overwritten. And Eddie Campbell’s art is a bit scratchy and stiff. But I don’t doubt this is worth reading, even if I did see the forgettable movie version (Moore hates all movie adaptations of his work) and don’t care about Jack the Ripper.

The Best Poems of 2011

Anita Barrows ….. “The Ancestors”
Guy Bennett …. “Poem after Josef Sudek” and “Condensed Poem” and “Necessary Poem”
Molly Fisk ….. “Red River” and “This is the Story of My Life”
Angela Weld Grimke ….. “Tenebris”
Paul Guest ….. “Elba”
Judith Herzberg ….. “Kinneret”
Rachel Korn ….. “From Here to There”
Donna M. Lane ….. “Pajamas”
Nicanor Parra ….. “A Man”
Gyorgy Petri ….. “I Am Stuck, Lord, on Your Hook”
Edouard Roditi ….. “The Paths of Prayer”
Harvey Shapiro ….. “Like a Beach”
Leonora Speyer ….. “The Ladder”
Anna Swir ….. “He Was Lucky”
Julia Vinograd ….. “Street Musician”
Stanislaw Wygodski ….. “Winter Journey”

plus haiku by John Brandi (2), Margaret Chula (2), Cid Corman (2), Raffael de Gruttola, Diane di Prima, Bernard Lionel Einbond, David Elliott, Sandra Fuhringer, Christopher Herold (3), Brent Partridge, Alan Pizzarelli, Jane Reichhold, Frank K. Robinson, Alexis Rotella (2), Edith Shiffert, Ruby Spriggs, Tom Tico, Anita Virgil

Did you make my list of the Best Poems of 2011? If you did, yay for you, I guess. If you didn’t, well, maybe I didn’t read any of your poems.

The list is a favorites list, which poems I liked best of those read in 2011.

I keep a stack of placemarks ready whenever I’m reading poetry. If a poem strikes me just right, I pop a placemark into the book so I can revisit. If, after several rereadings, I decide it’s a poem I don’t want to leave behind, I hand copy the poem and slip it into a 3-ring binder. I’ve been doing this for about 24 years so I’ve got some fat binders.The one I’ve been filling for the last twelve years has finally gotten too tight, so I’m moving it to the archive shelf and starting anew.

On the first of the year I read aloud all the poems I’ve collected over the previous year. Usually I’m reading to myself, in case you were wondering. This year Kent listened in. Of course, he had his own opinions and wasn’t afraid to question my choices. If you want your tastes reflected, friends, fill your own notebooks. On the whole, though, he seemed to enjoy it, even tearing up over Donna Lane’s “Pajamas.”

I haven’t posted a “Best Poems” list since 2008, so I have 2009 and 2010 to share with you folks. Yes, I had favorites those years, too.

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

a tale of two Burroughses

Tarzan fascinated me and inspired a lifelong love of Africa, its people, and its wildlife. … When I first read Tarzan, going to Africa became an imperative. And I also desperately wanted to be able to communicate with animals as my hero did. Edgar Rice Burroughs never set foot in Africa (in fact, William S. Burroughs has probably been a more reliable guide to me), and his descriptions bear no relation to what it actually looks like, or what it’s like to live there …

So the book that set Tony Fitzjohn on his way to becoming the main assistant to George Adamson in the camp Adamson set up to return orphaned and failed pet lions to the wild in Kenya was a book that bore “no relation” to reality … There’s something about the magic of the imagination, eh? Africa is more accessible than Barsoom!

There’s something else in the quote I’m going to point out. I read several books at once and it’s not uncommon for me to turn from one book, a book on lions, say, to another set in an entirely different milieu, U.S. indie rock, maybe, and in that same reading period find the different books talk about the same thing. William S. Burroughs, in this case. In my January First post I quote from Bob Mould. He stole a book from the library, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. A Brit who ends up a lion caretaker in Africa and an upstate NYer who ends up a rock star were both into William Burroughs.

source: Born Wild: the extraordinary story of one man’s passion for Africa by Tony Fitzjohn

“the ground had become impregnated with urine”

[L]ions are not particular about where they urinate. They will do it lying, sitting or standing, at any time and in any place, although they are most particular about where they defecate and will always move well away from their sleeping places. It is quite possible that their free and easy habits of urination have a definite purpose. Lion urine appears to be an insect repellent as I noticed this to be the case of Elsa and her sisters; their small night enclosure became heavily infested by fleas, but after a time, when the ground had become impregnated with urine, the fleas disappeared.

source: A Lifetime with Lions by George Adamson

According to Masters & Johnson

I’d heard that Masters & Johnson, the sex researchers, had studied gay people, but that their final report was riddled with homophobia. In her book on sex research Mary Roach reads the M&J report and lets us know, not only is it flawed by homophobia, the gay people come off as better lovers than hets.

They ‘tended to move slowly … and to linger at … [each] stage of stimulative response, making each step in tension increment something to be appreciated …’ They teased each other ‘in an obvious effort to prolong the stimulatee’s high levels of sexual excitation.’

Those are some of Roach’s excerpts from Masters & Johnson, thus Roach’s elisions and interpolation. Some of the couples were singles randomly assigned by the researchers. For the shy among us, you might note that all the couples, male/male, female/female, and female/male, performed under lights in a lab while being observed. All must have been pretty confident about their ability to showcase their skills.

According to Masters & Johnson a woman would get about as turned on by her female lover’s arousal as by anything happening exclusive to herself. This, you might or might not be surprised to learn, was not the case with hets. The goal in het sex is climax, with both boys and girls trying to push their partners to rapid release. M&J call this “goal orientation, … trying to get something done,” with main focus on the genitals, and by that I mean the penis.

Meanwhile, the homosexual men lavished attention on their partners’ entire bodies. And the gay men, like the gay women, were adept at the tease.

The gay lovers “talked far more easily, often, and openly about what they did and didn’t enjoy. Gay men and women simply seemed more comfortable in the world of sex.”

And the homophobia? Where did that come in? “Masters & Johnson spent the second half of the book touting a therapy for helping homosexuals convert to heterosexuality.” Oh. One can see how that would overshadow the research’s positives.

source: Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach

“Smoking … the timepiece of my life”

I started smoking a pack a day at the beginning of college, and by the end, I was up to three packs a day. Smoking had become both the centerpiece and timepiece of my life. Every cigarette was six minutes long, and I could practically mark out the whole day with smoking, like a sundial. Six minutes on, nine minutes off. Repeat sixty times a day.

When I came across this passage in Bob Mould’s new memoir I was surprised. Here was a reason for smoking that had never occurred to me. Cigarette as timepiece!

I remember being delighted the first time I was given candy cigarettes. I could mime the grown-ups at last. I could playact the mystery of smoking. It wasn’t very good candy. And I wasn’t that picky about candy! Fiddling with the candy cigarette told me nothing about what would make one want to suck smoke and stink up their clothes. I did like fire. And cigarette lighters. Having permission to set little fires all day everywhere seemed seductive.

When my brother told me he’d been secretly smoking cigarettes I pestered him to explain what he got out of it. The explanation didn’t sound sufficient. Something about a waky buzz? I tried, smoking at least one cigarette sitting behind a bush near the little league bleachers. When it made me sick I was told that’s what happens to everybody, but you get over that. Plus there’s something cool about it because the people who smoke are cool. Oh? My stepmother was cool? I liked her all right. But, I don’t know, cool?

source: See a Little Light: the trail of rage and melody by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad

another memoir, another library thief

During the day, my work-study job was at the library. I would move quietly through the stacks, restocking the returned books and observing people studying quietly – or discreetly pleasuring themselves in an obscure alcove. It happened all the time. I also lifted the library’s lone copy of Naked Lunch for my personal collection.

source: See a Little Light: the trail of rage and melody by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad

compare to our last library thief

“Ambassadors of affable storms honor my effigy”

Thanks, George Hitchcock, for giving me the title of this last post of 2011. The words are from his poem “My Days and Nights,” which appears in The Wounded Alphabet: Poems Collected and New, 1953-1983. See you all in Twelve!

“a matter of common report”

I have to quote this excerpt from the medieval guidebook to the prosecution of witches, Malleus Maleficarium. The author takes as a given that everybody knows about “those witches who … sometimes collect male organs [yes, penises] in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report[.]” (The ellipsis is in the original excerpt.)

source: Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach

“I like America”

In his book on poetry, Beautiful and Pointless, David Orr does some research. Into the Google search box he slips a phrase like “I like baseball,” then compares the number of results to a phrase like “I love baseball.” “I like baseball,” Orr says, returns nearly 5 times as many results as “I love baseball.” Orr:

[T]he phrase “I like music” appears roughly three times as often as “I love music,” and the phrase “I like movies” is about five times as common as “I love movies.” (Indeed, the general preference for “I like X” is stronger than you might expect: Even “I love America” gets roundly stomped by “I like America,” just as “I love beer” is, to my sorrow and surprise, trumped by “I like beer.”) But the phrase “I love poetry” beats “I like poetry” by a ratio of two to one. … [N]o matter how many times I ran these particular searches (and I did this repeatedly over several days), I never got a result in which “I love poetry” failed to outperform the “like” version; in fact, one particular, presumably aberrant search returned thirty-six occurrences of “love” for every occurrence of “like.”

I repeated the experiment. For “I like poetry” I got about 1,260,000 results. For “I love poetry” I got about 4,170,000 results.

Then I thought, why not, I’ll try, “I don’t like poetry,” and got about 961,000 results. For “I hate poetry” I got about 285,000 results. Amusingly, many of the initial “I hate poetry” results are poems or poetry discussion groups.

I did pretty quickly find another supposedly atypical love/like asymmetry. “I love sex” (about 31,000,000 results) vs. “I like sex” (about 11,900,000 results). Does this say something about Poetry?

Interestingly, considering yesterday’s post, the likes vs. the loves as regards ping-pong are fairly comparable: “I like ping pong” (about 287,000 results) vs. “I love ping pong” (about 263,000 results). (For Orr the likes vs. the loves for “poker” came out about the same.) He also searches Cooking (2.8 : 1), Gardening (2.54 : 1), Romance Novels (3.36 : 1), and Stamp Collecting (3.5 : 1).

source: Beautiful and Pointless: a guide to modern poetry by David Orr

Poetry as Ping-Pong

What is Poetry? One might “claim that all fictional and/or figurative language is a subset of poetry.”

I like this claim. The above formulation is David Orr’s, from his book on poetry, Beautiful and Pointless. I prefer to say, “Poetry is Art created using the material of Language.” This subsumes “all fictional and/or figurative language” under the term Poetry, doesn’t it. I partly like this definition because it makes so grand a pronouncement as to stymie argument, or, rather, to move the argument so far away from the usual fussing over line breaks and stressed syllables that those tiresome old niggly bits don’t even come up.

David Orr does not approve. He calls this an “untenable position.” He says this “is like asserting that all games played with vaguely spherical objects are really ping-pong.”

So. Poetry is Ping-Pong? No, Mr Orr. Poetry is not Ping-Pong. No more than it’s Tennis. Or Football – can one say American football is played with a “vaguely spherical object” anyway? Is poetry a game? What score does one need in order to win?

source: Beautiful and Pointless: a guide to modern poetry by David Orr

“atypical and exceptional”

[C]ompetitions are the way in which many, if not most, books of poems are published nowadays. For example, when you see a phrase like ‘Winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry’ on the cover of a collection, it means that the manuscript in question was selected in an open competition … Typically, books published through these competitions have a series editor who appoints judges each year, and in some cases those judges are anonymous. In addition, these contests cost money to enter – usually around thirty dollars or so. … Every year, large numbers of poets … end up spending hundreds [of dollars] for the chance to publish a book …

The above comes from David Orr’s new book about poetry today, Beautiful and Pointless. I quote him mainly to introduce the next quote, this one from Carolyne Wright’s essay on how her books came to be:

[T]he publication of both my first and so-called second books qualified, according to some rubrics, as a chapbook and a limited edition, respectively – they represented such atypical and exceptional publishing circumstances that very few publishing contest organizers could determine what their actual designation was. Before sending to competitions for second or third books, on several occasions I had to query managing editors and explain these circumstances in order to learn whether I was qualified to submit. Fortunately, the ostensible third collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire, won the Blue Lynx Prize, an open competition for poets at any stage of their publishing career, so the status of earlier collections didn’t matter.

When Carolyne Wright’s first two books – each of which was the winner of a different competition – turned out not to fit the standard definition of a full-length poetry book, she found herself in difficulty. Wright seems to have concluded she could not ethically enter a first book competition, but could she justify entering a second book competition? In the end, as she says, she managed to win a competition that wasn’t restricted to first books or second books. (Or third books? Who knew there were competitions exclusively for third books?) Carolyne Wright seems to have gone all-in on the competition as the way to see her books into print.

I hate contests. Well, not per se. But I do hate that contests have become “the way … most books of poems are published.” It seems to me that if you are going to get into the business of publishing poetry you should choose to publish what you love. Or who you love. There is no money in it. The reward you’re going to get (if you get any at all) is seeing poetry you believe in by poets you admire get into the hands of readers who, for a few precious moments, will not be wasting their time reading bad poetry by tiresome poets. And you’re going to be putting a lot of time and effort – and your own money – into that triumph. So why waste your time publishing anything but what you love?

There is no money in it? Not in selling poetry. (Yes, every so often there’s going to be the freak like Billy Collins or the perennial dead poet who gets assigned in enough college courses to make it worth a publisher’s while to keep her – and books about her – in print. There is a little bit of money in selling poetry. It just doesn’t spread far.)

There is money in publishing poetry. But it’s not from selling it to readers. The money comes from the other side of the transaction – the poets. Poets are so desperate to get into print they shell out hundreds of dollars in contest entry fees. $30+ entry fees fund the publication of the lucky winners. It could be you’re super talented (or super connected) and you win the very first contest you enter. One wants to believe one would be that poet! But even good poets who have published frequently in literary magazines and ezines have to enter contests over and over before they win. And there isn’t even a guarantee anyone will win. A few years ago the name poet who was hired to judge one of the most prestigious contests, The Yale Series of Younger Poets, decided not one of the manuscripts submitted was worthy of his recommendation. The prize went unawarded that year. Fun, huh?

Do these prize books sell out their print runs? More frequently than the book brought out by the publisher who put his effort into it out of love? Some contests will send the winning book out to all entrants. Is that a way to get it read?

Because so many poets are academics, David Orr says, they have to publish in order to keep their jobs. The contest entry fee as a business expense? If you never win, what happens?

sources: Beautiful and Pointless: a guide to modern poetry by David Orr, and “A Reply to Storms: How Some Collections Were Ordered (or Disordered)” by Carolyne Wright, appearing in the bookOrdering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems edited by Susan Grimm

what I picked up at A.P.E.

Gaylord Phoenix by Edie Fake I’ve purchased mini comics, but this is the first time I’ve seen a collected edition.

Lies Grown Ups Told Me a comics anthology edited by Nomi Kane, Caitlin M., and Jen Vaughn

Love Is the Reason: a Cavalcade of Boys story by Tim Fish

Wish the World and Sidewalk Empire: the avenues mini comics by Eddie H. Ahn

The Book of Boy Trouble!, vol. 2: Born to Trouble a comics anthology edited by Robert Kirby and David Kelly

Luci’s Let Down created and written by Marjee Chmiel, art by Sandra Lanz

Pardon Our Dust no. 4, Spring 2011, a tabloid-sized literary & art magazine out of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena

plus scads of postcards – most free promo, though I did hand over money for one or two.

The Alternative Press Expo (A.P.E.) in San Francisco continues for a few more hours today.

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

I found The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. So much for memory.

I remember buying a copy of the Books of Wonder edition of Wizard for the son of our contractor. The contractor had borrowed a copy of the recent University of Nebraska edition of Baum’s Twinkle Tales, a collection of fantasies starring a girl named Twinkle that were actually set on the prairie, rather than in a separate fantasy land like Oz (or Mo or Ix). The contractor’s son reportedly loved the book, but had never read The Wizard of Oz so when I saw the Books of Wonder edition at the used bookstore I bought it as a gift.

The contractor had had the strange notion I’d be doing him a big boon in his seven-year-old son’s eyes if I found an original edition of The Twinkle Tales. The contractor’s own eyes clearly glazed over when I said the U of NE paperback is the first time all those stories appeared together and tracking down the originals would be very expensive and … And I knew having some dumb collectible wouldn’t be any fun for a small boy.

When I found the copy of Wizard in good condition without a dust jacket I knew it the better choice. A couple weeks later the boy came to the house with his mother and, after parental prodding, thanked me for the book. But what gratified me more than a few mumbled words was the way he hung onto the book and swung it around while he talked about it and talked about how he liked the Wicked Witch.

I liked the Books of Wonder edition and decided I would get one for myself. So I guess it seemed like a lot of time passed between the purchases. Must not have. Because I discovered the copy I bought for myself (also used, but with dust jacket!) at the bottom of the shelves I shoved my Oz books onto, hidden behind cardboard to keep the construction dust from coating them (& to protect from cats peeing). Time elongated over the course of that renovation …

Finding the book after looking for it so long was almost a disappointment. I’d taken to picturing myself paging through other editions in search of the perfect unDenslow Wizard, thus shaking up my settled notion of the classic. Okay, so I was wrong about the book not being purchased “long after things had to be gotten out of the way of the workers and the dust.” My tactile memory was good, even if my chronology was whack. And, having looked over another illustrator at the bookstore I ducked into on my way home from the dentist this morning, I’m good with W.W.

I did buy an Oz book while I was there. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Also a Books of Wonder edition. Nice color plates. I got it for 20% off because I was able to identify the opening sentence the bookseller had written as a challenge on the chalkboard on the sidewalk. “You Googled it!” he said. Oh please.

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

The Mysterious Disappearance of Oz

Sometime in the last year I found a like-new copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at a local used bookstore. It’s a recent edition created by Books of Wonder & Morrow, but it is modeled after the first edition of Wizard and W.W. Denslow’s beautiful design.

I’ve been imagining rereading the Oz series, all 40+ books, and I was thinking that recent acquisition would be a fine place to start. Y’gotta start with Wizard, of course, but there are many editions and many illustrators who have added their vision to Baum’s. Being as I fell in love with Wizard reading a Dover edition, a paperback which does a pretty good job of reproducing Denslow’s design – as well as his illustrations – and considering I virtually have the book memorized I read it so many times as a child, perhaps it would make the reread a fresher experience if I took advantage of an edition illustrated by someone very unlike Denslow.

Sacrilege!

… No, no. It’s not a bad thought, actually.

A thought that probably would not have entered my head had not that nice BoW/M edition gone missing. I have no idea where it could be. I haven’t dug down to the bottom of every pile or opened every stacked box, but I was sure I had no need to. Since the renovation completed we’ve been unpacking boxes, not filling them. I don’t remember when exactly I bought this new edition, but it was quite recently, long after things had to be gotten out of the way of the workers and the dust. So where could it have hidden itself?

stats

For LoveSettlement, my other blog, I set up a Sitemeter, but for Dare I Read I haven’t had any statistics. Until this week. When Blogger decided at last to offer some up on the publishing dashboard.

I didn’t have a Sitemeter on DIR because when I signed up for it, it didn’t look like you could have more than one. Maybe that changed or maybe I just didn’t understand the way it worked. But LuvSet got so few visitors that the stats service told me little; it hardly seemed worth bothering with. The one thing that seemed clear, the more frequently I posted, the fewer visitors I got. The “Thousand” project, which has been just about all LuvSet’s been occupied with this 490 days, sure hasn’t brought in the readers.

When I got the Sitemeter I was making efforts to promote LuvSet. DIR I was just letting gather what eyeballs it could on its own. I didn’t figure people would care that much about my reading. My one test to see if DIR was getting noticed was adding Google Adsense. I forget how long the ads have been there, hunkered down in the right hand column. Two years? Three? Five? You don’t get a check until the ads have earned $100. So far the account has accrued $7.01. Only $93 away from getting paid. Thanks, new dashboard! I haven’t checked the account in ages. Now it’s so easy to see.

So it’s fun to see info you used to have to search for. I now know which is my most popular post: Dialect in Wuthering Heights

The post (from 2008) gets twice the page views of any other on DIR, not just in the history of the blog, but every day.

The top four most visited posts are all from 2008. The fifth is from May of this year.

If you’re curious, they are:

#2 Stegosaurus v. Tyrannosaurus

#3 Ant Head Sutures

#4 The French in Tropic of Cancer

#5 Cowboys and Pistols

And to put this in perspective, not even the Wuthering Heights post has yet had a thousand visitors.