An Embarrassment of Riches...

To quote Emily Dickinson, "I am nobody..." And maybe that is part of the problem. No, that's not what she would say. We aren't supposed to tell, otherwise they'd advertise; and there's nothing worse than being a frog and telling one's name the live-long day.

Yet here we are. Saddled with the task of writing long and short and medium descriptions for our books. Some poets proudly don't get their hands dirty, others do this work for them and they view po-biz as something below them; some with no apparent sense of shame proudly push their work; others only self-consciously and anxiously. Not all of us are Whitman, sending our chapbooks to Emerson and publishing our expanded version with the private praise of the literary establishment. Then again, even the reclusive and reticent-to-print Dickinson still wondered if her poems were publishable; this was before deciding that the standards/standardization of print culture would work against her syntax and idiosyncratic punctuation. And while she may have expounded in her letters on her intent, it is hard to think she would have gone about writing publisher descriptions.

But some things need to be done. Like blurbs, like dust-jacket/inside flap descriptions, descriptions for publishers and bookstores, and etc. And small houses don't have the resources. So I find myself needing to write descriptions, not just for one but for two books. One doesn't want this to happen--two books out in a year, much less same month. One wants, and some presses insist on, spacing between the appearance of books. But, to quote Emily again, "I am nobody..." and being nobody brings with it certain risks, or certain ways of operating that, if you're lucky, lead to an embarrassment of riches.

After years of writing and only getting a poem published here and a poem published there, followed by a suite of chapbooks in small, independent presses, in 2021 I had two books come out. world as sacred burning heart and Self-Portrait as an Iguana. I had not planned on it. World was a book that I slowly had been writing in English over the course of ten years. And, Self-portrait, while containing poems I had first started writing over twenty years before they were published, was a collection mostly written in Spanish and sent off to a Spanish-language competition. At a certain point, you get used to sending work out whether to competitions or general submissions and hearing back, "keep writing and getting better. maybe next time." So, while I almost never simultaneously submit, I often have work from altogether different projects out making the rounds. It just so happened that the stars aligned. And both books came out in 2021. (Even now, there is a book of translations and a book of my own Spanish poems that I thought were going to be published two years ago, if not three. Who knows, said publisher might surprise me at some point when another book is coming out.)

Four years later, it has happened again. This August I will have two more books out. The first of these is a book of translated poems--Waiting for Perec by the Chilean poet Mario Meléndez. You can read the long description here. The short description reads:

Waiting for Perec is a collection of surreal, oracular poems written by an anonymous urn maker whose job when not working the kiln, it seems, is to rummage through the attic of the 20th Century for bits and bobs of high culture and pop culture to mix and match. In this book, Meléndez continues perfecting a process he began in his earlier collection, Death’s Days Are Numbered, where the poet is lost in the funhouse of language, lost in the way that children get lost in play. Like Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, and other masters of ludic literature that is, at the same time, deadly serious, Meléndez’s poetry goes about building an uncanny map of our hyperconnected world.

Writing about the poetry of others comes much more easily to this professor of literature whose preparation has been exclusively academic and scholarly. Also, while I do think a certain amount of critical awareness of one's practice is necessary, I jive with these comments W. S. Merwin made to Daniel Bourne in an interview about the art of translation:

I have no idea. I don’t have any ideological sense of what is Merwinlike or un-Merwinlike. I’m always happy to find I’m writing a poem which is different from anything I’ve written before, but I don’t think you can really write out a paradigm. To be surprised is to find new directions and new regions you haven’t been into yet, to be surprised by your own writing,that’s what I would always be hoping for...I don’t really theorize much about my own writing, I don’t even pay too much analytical attention to it.

The second, a book of my own poems, how to recognize god's chosen, is another one of those books that took me ten years to write. So here were are with another double publication. And the need to write some book descriptions. They tell you: don't hold your poem by the hand; it needs to stand on its own; have the poem do the work, not your explanation. And then they tell you: write a short, medium, and long description of your book.

how to recognize god’s chosen is a collection of poetic fragments that make up a long poem loosely structured like a gospel account. The principal character of the lyrical narrative is referred to with the non-gendered pronouns zhe/hir, or at times as god’s chosen or at others as the beloved. Pulling from a variety of religious and sacred texts--the Prophets, the Gospels, the Desert Fathers, Medieval mystics, the Upanishads, Sufi poets, and others--and the scholarly, textual debates surrounding manuscript culture, how to recognize god’s chosen imagines a search for the divine set our contemporary moment of refugee crises, climate catastrophe, political populism, and the various forms of violence that make up life in the 21st century.