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In These Hands
A Book is Made
Dear Mooners,
My from scratch publication of my book, My Life in Several Seconds, a Collection of Poems by Jim Corner, is in its second draft stage, which means its bound, paperback style, and is complete in every way except for the Library of Congress number, etc.
I've worked hard to learn and practice perfect paperback binding. I believe I will be able to bind one book every half-hour at the end of self-training. I'm using simple tools I purchased on-line and I'm way beyond the stage of frustration. I'm using the simple method of four poems per sheet, that means the book is 8 1/2 by 5 3/4 inches in size. With a template for a simple four page folder the 8 1/2 sheet is folded and two poems are on the front and 2 on the back. My book is 23 actual sheets which provide room for frontal items and 84, 8 1/2 by 5 3/4 pages.
An advantage is that the folded edges of the spine weld more securely than with single pages. I use a medium glossy (on one side) cover. My HP 6000 l laser printer calls for an 8 1/2 by 14 cover. Since there must be a bit less than an inch for the spine this cover can be trimmed after the cover is fastened to the spine. E-6000 jell glue does a masterful job of fastening the scored cover. My success with my book has given me to courage to apply for the pleasure of hand-publishing your next book, for a much cheaper, but perhaps stronger book. Satisfaction guaranteed!
It's really fun!
My best, Jim Corner, Publisher
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About This Issue
In this issue, Jim finds the joy in creativity -- that the hand that makes the poem can also make the book. Bill explores words and poetry, and how some folks see a need for rigidity. Chris has the IBPC round-up, and offers our heartfelt good wishes to all in the competition.
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When Freed, A Poem Comes into Its Own
Some years back, while I was on retreat at a Benedictine Monastery for women in Pittsburgh, I enjoyed conversations with a Sister from East Africa -- Uganda, I believe. She was a PhD student in Pittsburgh, aiming to go home and teach at the University; she was doing her dissertation on Shakespeare. I shared with her the poetry I was writing at the time; she was very insistent on learning my intention in writing the poem as her opinion was that authorial intention is most crucial in interpreting the poem. I tried unsuccessfully to suggest that the poem takes on its own life once it hits the page, and (more particularly) meets a reader’s eye.
I know that, on Desert Moon Review, some poets are quite insistent that the original, authorial intent is the matter at hand, that the poem has a single proper meaning and that if it is written properly and read properly that single proper meaning will appear. A distinct anxiety comes out of the responses to critiques over precisely that matter.
Again, some critiques seek out what might have spawned the poem, or what its intent might have been, going so far as to suggest that such matter be more clearly stressed within the poem. While I thoroughly agree that all matter of importance to the poem be in fact included within poem itself, I am not inclined to say that everything related to the poem needs to be included. As I tried to suggest to that Benedictine Sister in Pittsburgh some 8 years ago, the poem becomes its own agent once it is freed from the pen.
Now, I am not trying to say that a poem can mean just anything. I distinctly recall one of my own poems, posted on DMR a few years ago, in which I referred to gold aspen leaves. I was told that the poem as written was impossible because it was not a nature poem which the aspen leaves insisted it be – that I did not conform to expectations of the reader. Well, the poem could not mean what the reader wanted it to mean, a fact that he (it was a man) acknowledged with great frustration and insistence. The poem can only say what the poem can say: syntax rules, and the dynamics of the metaphorical structure do not allow all possibilities.
At the same time, the poem necessarily interacts with the reader. At a certain level, the writer can expect a level of sophistication in the reader, one that reads the language as it is written, encounters the metaphors that exist on the page, engages the cadence and sound, the flow of lines and the energy of enjambments, the formal matters that make up even free verse poetry. That is the basic structure of understanding the language as it appears in poetry: without that much, even doggerel makes no sense. But that is hardly the reason any of us read poetry, let alone write it. We write it as we read it, to engage our minds with those of others and to savor the nuances that grow between us.
Coming off some comments by some anthropologists a few decades ago, I began to picture the way we grow as taking in what we experience (which includes what we read, of course), dynamically processing it through the symbolic world of the self to detect meaning-for-us. This new experience then also interacts with everything that has gone before, conscious and sub-conscious so as to generate a new self who then comes to a new experience afresh. Poetry, as I see it, is an interactive element that draws from the interaction of the poet with experience and imagination so as to open an experience to another, one whose reading generates meaning (constrained by the syntax and techniques inherent in the poem itself) for that reader.
It is for the poet to give what is needed and set the poem free; it is for the reader to engage the poem as it is, and sense the meaning that comes through the interaction with the poem, shaded by the self of the reader but not arbitrarily applied to the poem itself.
[Responses to this reflection through the agency of future Moon Notes are sincerely invited.]
Bill Flewelling
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IBPC Nominations
Desert Moon Review and IBPC
By your member votes, the following are the three poems from Desert Moon chosen to represent our workshop at the Interboard Poetry Competition (IBPC) for the month of May:
After Reading (a friend from England who doesn't know the half of it) by Laurie Byro
In A City Made of Seaweed (Double Sonnenizio on Two Lines by Ilya Kaminsky) by Dave Rowley
For the Wintered Bee by Allen Weber
Congratulations, Laurie, Dave, and Allen. We trust you to do well for Desert Moon Review! Congratulations as well to all who were nominated in the past month -- another strong month for writing here at the Moon. Thanks to everyone who voted.
In the IBPC competition for April, Desert Moon's own Mitchell Geller won an honorable mention for his poem "For PMD." Well done, Mitchell! Complete poems can be found at http://webdelsol.com/IBPC/winningpoems.html and Judge Bryan Appleyard's commentary is at http://webdelsol.com/IBPC/comentary.html.
Christopher T. George
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Send it to MoonNotes.
Moon Notes is a monthly publication of Desert Moon Review.
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