Monthly Archives: December 2022

3 posts

New Years, Always Bittersweet

humor opinion

A new  year. Always a bittersweet thing. Having 2023 on the doorstep, left by someone who wants no part of it, all swaddled and innocent-looking (for now), is a scary thing. Isn’t it every year? Been there, done that, know better. And it all gets you thinking… thinking about stuff you’ve thought a lot about already:

  • Is it me, or do celebrations seem “forced” on New Year’s Eve? Like St. Patrick’s Day, it has devolved into a drinking holiday more than any other kind of holiday.
  • The best New Year’s Eve I ever spent? One where I  broke a commitment to attend a party and stayed home reading E.B. White’s Collected Essays. I never even noticed as midnight came and went. Now that’s a great way to ring in the new–turning pages!
  • I noticed the neighbors took down Christmas decorations much sooner than in past years–before New Year’s Eve, even. One reason might be Christmas exhaustion. The material holiday, songs and all, gets foisted on us the day after Halloween nowadays. By December 26th, folks are waving the white flag. Mercy!
  • Speaking of, is there a cleaner feeling than a house once the tree is pitched and the decorations are boxed and returned to the basement? Yes, we will find a few needles from the tree along about Easter, but still, it’s a sigh of relief to be done with it once it’s done with you.
  • Before you call me a Christmas Curmudgeon, know this. A lot of my fellow Americans really got into the holiday this year because it was comfort food of a sort. Yes, they overindulged in their family traditions, but given the pall over our heads these days (Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and targeting of civilians, inflation, Agent Orange running for president again, etc.) it made them feel better to go to the birthday party at Farmer Gray’s or to shout “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!” or to listen to silver bells in the city. Who can blame them for covering themselves in the warm folds of Christmas pasts? They were simply hiding in hopes of making it all go away.
  • Resolutions? Don’t do it! They don’t work, especially this time of year. Pick another day to resolve. Arbor Day resolutions, maybe, sturdy as an oak. Then make sure said resolution is measurable and concrete–one you can track and WILL track. Otherwise, who wants to hear it?
  • The average American gains around 2 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, or so I read. Seems low… or so my scale thinks.
  • Let’s hear it for January, named after the Roman God Janus, a two-faced sort who looked both forward and back, refusing to play favorites between past and oncoming year. Most folks find it bleak, cold, and insufferable, but January’s all right by me, being holiday-free once the first folds.
  • I’ve been avoiding front pages of newspapers lately, cutting right to the sports and the arts sections. Is this similar to the Christmas-as-comfort-food thing? And who am I kidding? Just because all the bad news goes away for me doesn’t mean it goes away, right?
  • After enjoying Laura Dassow Walls’ biography of Henry David Thoreau, I might up the ante on my bio-reading for 2023. I already have the door-stopper from Ron Chernow, Grant, and am thinking about a bio of Joyce, too.
  • Hopefully, Grant does not become a Broadway show. The thought of ole Ulysses S. traipsing across a stage while singing tunes is enough to discourage any man, although (fact!) he once performed in an army play during the Mexican War.
  • This morning, I caught a falling star as I was out in the climate-warmer than usual air. Must be my lucky day, this last one! Should I buy a lottery ticket, maybe? Nah. One tax I don’t have to pay.
  • Minor Miracle: How something as small as a chickadee, titmouse, or nuthatch can not only live in winter, warm of frigid, but do it joyfully.
  • Speaking of taxes and New Year’s, is anyone still watching all of these NCAA bowl games? I didn’t think so. Factoid: Just learned yesterday that the NCAA, one of the biggest money-makers in the nation, is not taxed because of its (ahem) educational mission. The new tax legislation continues this boondoggle. More taxes for you and me, but none for the NCAA sponsored by $$$ Chevrolet $$$ and $$$ Coca-Cola $$$. It’s the American way: we are all equal, except corporations are more equal than the rest of us.
  • As the famous line goes: “Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations” is here. Poor Mr. Lincoln must be turning over in his grave.
  • Also learned yesterday: Many people eat sauerkraut on New Year’s for good luck. Really? My grandmother used to make it in a crock at home. Fermented was big with our grandparents, who knew a thing or two about healthy eating before we had “experts” to tell us a thing or two about healthy eating.
  • Grandma ate “organic,” too, though the word didn’t even exist because EVERYTHING was organic before the Chemical Age (which came to us along about WWII). So the next time you sniff and dismiss yuppies and foodies who spend more for “organic,” remember that it is normal, healthy food that should NOT be overpriced but is thanks to the giant corporations who prefer the profits in irradiated, herbicide- and pesticide-laden foods (not to mention GMOs)—all stuff Grandma would rightly call “science fiction to be avoided.”
  • For a guy who avoids front pages, I’m getting awfully political. Good. Get it out of my system. All politics is local, which you might be able to control. Focus your life locally, then, starting with your family.
  • Happy New Year, readers May your local dreams come true in the fast-approaching year!

How Low Can a Book’s Price Go?

my poems poetry books publishing Reincarnation & Other Stimulants

Editor’s Note: There must be a chimpanzee pushing buttons in the Amazon pricing booth. Two days after this post, in which I marveled that the cost of my book was marked down 48% by Amazon dot glom, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants returned to its full price. Three days after that, it dropped to 24% off. The moral of the story, Tarzan, is to check daily for bargains. When it hits half off again–jump!–because it doesn’t go lower than the mezzanine.

 

When it comes to Amazon dot com, one is always wondering, “How low can you go?”

No, I’m not speaking of their ethics. I’m speaking of their prices. And their pricing policies, the mechanics of which are unknown. In fact, the variations in some books’ prices track like New England weather—spring today, winter tomorrow, summer next week if you don’t pay attention. If someone understands what’s going on, it’s surely a mystery wrapped inside a bang-the-conundrum slowly.

Exhibit A has been my latest poetry collection, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants. I’ve been watching it roller coaster, and it’s a wilder ride than any Mr. Toad ever took.

Today, though, took all. Its price dropped to 48% off, $9.65. Halved like a grapefruit.

I’d like to say (indignantly) this hurts, but it doesn’t. In fact, though I don’t know why this book has been singled out (and my second from the same publisher, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, still selling for the manufactured retail, has not), I’m OK with it. Sharks need movement to live, poems need eyes. Cue the music.

So, yeah. If it moves a few books into Amazon’s cart. If it stuffs a few stockings. If it warms the hearts of a few poetry fans, all good. Sold books do wonders for the little guy (waves hand from the back row), so I hope the bottom line is that it helps my bottom line and attracts more readers. As for Amazon’s bottom line, nobody’s worried about that. No. Not in the least.

Merry 17 Days Until Christmas!

Knock-Out Poetry

poetry books

When your average reader thinks of the word “poetry,” he doesn’t think of the word “macho” at the same time. And yet, macho poetry exists. That is, if you’re willing to bend “macho” from its negative connotations and tag along instead with Edward Hirsch’s description of Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out – “gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.”

Then there’s Tap Out’s cover. A man’s hands clasped. True, they’re so greasy they look less like a wrestler’s hands than a miner’s or auto mechanic’s, but they certainly convey the idea. What’s most important, though, are the poems in this 2019 outing. Y-chromosome or no, many are damn good.

For instance, Kunz mines the tried and true (for poets) territory of an alcoholic, abusive father to good effect. I was especially taken with “Close,” which originally appeared, appropriately enough, in Narrative magazine.

 

Close

 

Off early from B&R Diesel, sharp

with liquor and filtered Kings, he drifts

across the double-yellow, swings

into an iced-over lot. He runs me through

the basics: K-turn, parallel, back-in.

Jerks the Sierra into reverse and eases

the bumper up against the side

of the old bank building. We meet

at the end of the loaded bed, exhaust

and brakelight pooling around our knees.

He balls the front of my coat in his fist,

pulls me close to show the distance

between bumper and brick, pulls hard

until I’m up against the slender arc

of his collarbone, the fine dark stubble

shading his jaw, his hollowed-out cheeks.

He’s still beautiful, my father. Fluid.

Powerful. His bare forearms corded

with muscle, bristling in the cold. Yes,

he’s drunk. Yes, I have already begun the life-

long work of hating him, a job

that will carve me down to almost

nothing. I have already begun to catalog

every way he has failed me. Yes.

And here he is. Home early from a day shift

in Fall River. Teaching me what I need

to know. Pulling me roughly toward him,

the last half-hour of sunlight blazing

in his face, saying This is how close

you can get. Asking if I can see it.

If I know what he means. Saying This. This

close. Like this.

 

Like many poems in this collection, a narrative poem told with economy. A vivid snapshot in time. “Close” is particularly powerful thanks to the turn that begins with the line “He’s still beautiful, my father” – not words you’d expect from a teen whose father has him by the fist. And that bit about “the life- / long work of hating him, a job / that will carve me down to almost / nothing.” Whew. It’s lines like this that leave me wondering why there are so many readers who do not bother reading poetry, for it is only poetry that can deliver rabbit-punches like this. What these readers are missing!

While still on my heels from reading “Close,” I turned the page and read “After the Attempt,” which appeared originally in Gulf Coast. In this case, it was the closing that wowed me. Kunz nails the landing, as they say. Even the Russian judge is forced to say as much.

 

After the Attempt

 

They took your shoelaces,

your carabiner of tooth-

edged keys, but left you

your belt, which you cinched

over your loopless scrubs.

 

They shaved your scalp

for the stitches but missed

a tuft above your ear

that catches the light

from the hingeless windows.

 

The receptionist holds up

a small paper bag

stapled shut. Whatever

you had worth saving.

You look, then look away.

 

Once, hungover

on a gut-and-remodel job

in Grafton, you cracked the root

of your nose with your claw

hammer’s backswing.

 

You stood very still after,

watching your blood scatter

on the plywood floor, alien

and bright as coins

from a distant country.

 

I don’t know about you, but I was bought and sold on that blood money at the end. Great image. It didn’t hurt that the familiar worked for it, too. Assuming the setting was Grafton, Massachusetts, this was only a town over from where I lived for twenty years.

In the end, I guess you can say this. There’s not a lot of “macho poetry” out there, and when there is, it’s not always worth reading. In the case of Edgar Kunz’s collection, however, another story. Another story entirely.