Henry's books go to market

I'm sending my books out into the mainstream... & the downloaded versions are less expensive... & I will keep trying to adapt to the revolution in formats... I like the 1930s kitchenware...

John Latta is a blunt, sometimes sarcastic iconoclast - who's nevertheless steadily concerned with what is correct & proper (ie. effective, true) in literary style. & he pursues this, & knows the history, & has educated himself, & me, & others too. He's a fertile conjunction of contraries - I mean the iconoclast obsessed with "rules of style" (there's probably a better French phrase for this).

Lanthanum update

Happily at work is Henry on Lanthanum. He just doesn't want to blog the latest yet, is all. Needs a few rejection slips first. Tay stewed.

Berryman's Recovery

Have been readin' with great interest John Berryman's unfinished (semi-autobiographical?) novel, Recovery. Set in an addiction rehab/treatment (AA) center (in Minnesota?). Self-centered, egotistical, self-conscious, ambitious, vain main character ("Alan Severance") - yet also vulnerable, aware of his faults, quick to observe & engage others... Berryman had such high intense nervous energy, so quick to go haywire, so various & in many ways committed, devoted, well-meaning (at least to poetry & the word, if not to others...). Want to read the Paul Mariani bio.

Recovery reminded me of A. Gopnik article in recent New Yorker, on Van Gogh : where he describes V. Gogh's intense communitarian idealism, his naivete... & how he only found a "beloved community", of caring fellow-sufferers, in the last years of his life - in a "mental institution"...

Henry's many many books of old-fashioned POETRY

Have been working on my books, lately. The prices have (unfortunately) gone way up here, because I've added ISBNs, & they will soon be part of a distribution service. Real books. So hopefully they will become more readily available, and at a more reasonable price, from regular booksellers. Will be working on "e-book" versions too - when a good conversion process comes along for poetry. At present, the software doesn't seem to handle complicated line-breaks etc. very well - but I suppose this will change pretty soon.

Since the Harriet website put me on "moderation" (for feuding w/Franz Wright), I haven't been in the mood to contribute there : probably a good thing. I was overdoing it... & these days they seem to be in a race toward generic meaningless blog-yammer, anyway. But I could be biased. (& maybe Franz is Wright, after all.) You step away from your own yammer-yammer briefly, and everything sounds a little different.

Poetry is not Facebook with lines, folks. But I am a face (a forehead) with lines...

Things are livening up a little over at the Plumbline School...

GH emergent

A very good review of Geoffrey Hill's selected poems, by Daniel Pritchard, here.

Rachel Wetzsteon

Starting to explore poetry & prose of Rachel Wetzsteon. On first glance she seems extremely good. Pity I'd never even heard of her, before the notice of her untimely death last month.

Happy 2010

Happy New Year, friends -

My bloggishness has slowed down of late, but I'm still hanging around. 2009 was fizzling out in December, after I made a fool of myself on the Harriet blog, getting into a needless tiff with Franz Wright... but then finally wrote a book review I'd been meaning to do for months (on Gabriel Gudding's poetry), & sent it off on January 31st. So that was a good way to end the year.

Over the weekend, sat down & re-read the whole of the Lanthanum so far. Have had misgivings about it, off & on. But re-reading it, I'm happy! Not perfect, but not a waste of time (let others decide). (A sort of oblique dove-muttering, I say.) On to Part Two, I hope.